A lot of the political discourse these days relates to the difference between democratic and non-democratic systems. More close to home, the amount of choice a government allows and - do not forget that part - demands from the individual. The usual path of such discourse is either "We let you do what you want!" or "We won't allow people do what you don't want!". I am telling you here that there is only a difference of nuance here, both systems are essentially doing the same thing, with top-to-bottom approaches or bottom-to-top. Like with the Borg in Star Trek, there is a point where both meet and make definition impossible.

My first argument is that the ideal democracy encourages personal freedom as long as it doesn't bother anyone else. That makes a lot of sense, like not allowing someone to kill you because they feel you're an asshole. Many people today live solely because of this side of democratic society. But it also means something else, something you are less prone to notice: you are demanded to know what everybody affected by your actions would feel about them. Forget the legal system, which in its annoying cumbersome way is only a shortcut to the principle described before. This is what it means, people: know your friends, know your enemies, join up! Otherwise you will just offend hard enough somebody who is important enough to make it illegal.

The non-democratic societies function like the all mighty parent of all. Under such governorship, all individual are children, incapable of making their own choices, unless supported by the whole of society or at least a large part of it. That's terribly oppressive, as it lets you do only what is communally permissible. But it also allows you the freedom of ignoring the personal choices of others. You don't need to know anything about anybody, just adhere to a set of rules that defines what you are allowed to do. It's that easy! That's why the system is so popular with uneducated people. Or maybe I should say lazy, to involve also those super educated people who end up supporting one radical view or another because it is inconvenient to find a middle ground compromise.

I am a techie, as you may know, so I will reduce all this human complexity to computer systems. Yes, I can! The first computer systems, created by scientists and highly technical people, were almost impossible to use. Not because they didn't let you do stuff, but because they let you do anything you wanted, assuming you were smart enough to understand what you were playing with. Obviously, few of us are really that smart. Even fewer want to make the effort. This is an important point: it's not that you are stupid, that you didn't read the manual, or anything like that. It's a rather aristocratic reason: you don't want to, don't need to, you expect comfort from the people who give you a complicated piece of machinery to operate. I mean, if they are smart to build one, why can't they make it so easy to use that a child could do it? (child sold separately, of course)

The answer to these complex UNIX systems was DOS, then Windows, then IOS. Operating systems increasingly dumbed down for the average user. Now everybody has a computer, whether a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone or a combination of these. Children have at their fingertips computers thousands of times more powerful that what I was using as a desktop in my childhood, and it is all because they have operating systems that allow them to quickly "get it" and do what they feel like. They are empowered by them to do... well.. incredibly idiotic things, but that is what children do. That's how they learn.

You get where I am getting at, I guess. We are all children now, with tools that empower us to get all the information and disinformation we could possibly want. And here is where it gets fuzzy. The totalitarian systems of yesterday are failing to constrain people to conform to the rules because of the freedom technology brought. But at the same time the democratic systems are also failing, because the complicated legal systems that were created as a shortcut for human stupidity and lack of understanding of the needs of others completely break down in front of the onslaught of technology, empowering people to evolve, change, find solutions faster than antiquated laws can possibly advance. The "parents" are in shock, whether biological ones or just people who think they know better for some reason.

Forget parents, older brothers can hardly understand what the youth of today is talking about. Laws that applied to your grandparents are hardly applicable to you, but they are incomprehensible to your children. The world is slowly reaching an equilibrium, not that of democracy and not that of totalitarianism, but the one in between, where people are not doing what they are allowed to, but what they can get away with! And that includes (if not first and foremost) our governors.

This brings me to the burden of choice, the thing that really none of us wants. We want to be able to choose when we want to be able to choose. And before you attack my tautology, think about it. It's true. We want to have the choice in specific contexts, while most of the time we want that choice removed from us, or better said: we want to be protected from choice, when that choice is either obvious, difficult to make or requiring skills we don't have. That is why you pay an accountant to hold the financial reins of your company, even if it is your lifeblood, and you trust that that person will make the right choices for you. If he doesn't, your life is pretty much forfeit, but you want it like that. The alternative is you would understand and perform accounting. Death is preferable.

You know that there are still operating systems that allow a high level of choice, like Linux. They are preferable to the "childish" operating systems because they give you all the options you want (except user friendliness, but that bit has changed too in the last decade). The most used mobile operating system nowadays is probably Android and if it not, it will be soon. It swept the market that Apple's IPhone was thought to master because it gave everybody (users and developers) The Choice. But the off the shelf Android phone doesn't allow that choice to the average user. You have to be technically adept first and emotionally certain second that you want to enable that option on your own phone! It's like a coming of age ritual, if you will, the first "jailbreak" or "root" of your smartphone.

How does that translate to real life? Right now, not much, but it's coming. It should be, I mean. Maybe I am overly optimistic. You get the accountants that find loopholes to pay less taxes, the lawyers that find the path to getting away with what normally would be illegal, the businessmen that eskew the rules that apply to any others. They are the hackers of the system, one that is so mindbogglingly complex that computer science seems a child's game in comparison. If you mess with them, they quickly give you the RTFM answer, like the Linuxers of old, though.

The answer: make the system user friendly. Technology can certainly help now. There will be hackers of the system no matter what you do, but if the system is easy to use, everyone will have the choice, when they want it, and will not be burdened by it, when they don't want it. People talking to find a solution to a problem? When did that ever work? We need government, law, business, social services, everyday life to work "on Android". We need the hurdles that stop us from enabling the "Pro" options, but they must not be impossible to get through. Bring back the guilds - without the monopoly - when people were helping each other to get through a problem together. Liberalize the banking and governmental systems. Forget about borders: just "subscribe" to a government, "like" a bank, "share" a life.

You think this is hard, but it is not. You can survive in an old fashioned system just as much and as well as you can survive in real life without using a computer. You can't! You can dream of a perfect house in the middle of nowhere with the white picket fence, where you will be happy with your spouse, children, dog, but really, that doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a virtual world. Where the spouse will not nag, the children will actually love you instead of doing things you don't even begin to understand and the dog will never wake you up when you need to sleep. Use the tools you have to make your life simpler, better, depth first!

I assume some people would give me the attitude that is prevalent in some movies that try to explore this situation: "you want to escape reality!" - Yes! Who doesn't? Have you seen reality lately? "you want to play God!" - Yes! I like playing and I would like being God: win-win! And if I cannot, I will get real serious and not play, just be! Is that OK? "this is fantasy, this cannot be!" - Join the billions of dead people who thought the same about what you are doing daily without thinking about it. "You are an anarchist! The government as it is today knows what to do!" or "Allah/Jesus/Dawkings know best!" - no, they don't! And if they knew, they wouldn't tell you, so there.

It all comes to dynamical systems versus static ones. You don't go to the web to search for things and find what you were actually looking for because there is a law against sites hijacking your searches. It is because people want it enough so that a service like Google appeared. You can still find your porn and your torrents, though.

Consider every option you may possible have as a service. You need the service to be discoverable, but not mandatory or oppressive in its design, it has to be easy to use. You want to be able to find and use it, but not for it to be imposed on you. A good example for this is copyright. A small community of producers and a significantly larger one of intermediaries trying to leach on them are attempting to force a huge community of consumers abide to the (otherwise moral and reasonable) laws of paying for what you want and others worked for. The procedure is so annoying that people spontaneously organize to create the framework that democratizes theft. Someone is risking jail to film the movie in the cinema so you can download it free. Why is that? Because technology increases the dynamicity of the system with orders of magnitude. Another service is sex. Porn be damned, prostitutes don't stay on street corners anymore, they wait on the web for you to need them. Supply and demand. So the important point is what are you really demanding?

You know what you won't find on the web? Easy to use government sites. Services that would make it simple to interact with laws, lawmakers, local authorities, country officials. All similar attempts are notoriously bad, if at all present. Why is that? Because the system itself is obsolete, incapable of adapting. Built from centuries of posturing and politicking, it has as little connection to reality as a session of Angry Birds. And you may be enjoying the latter. They survived as long as they have because they were the best at one thing: limiting your choices. Even if you hated it, you enjoyed other people being as limited as you. But the dam is breaking, the water is sipping through, it will all vanish in a deluge of water and debris. It's already started, with peer to peer banks and online cryptographic currencies and what not. Why wait for it? Join the nation of your choice; if there isn't one you like, create one. Be God, be Adam, Eve, the serpent or any combination thereof - whatever you do, just don't be yourself, no one likes that.


I leave you with the beautiful words and music of Perfect Circle: Pet. Something so awesome an entire corporation was created to offer the ability for people to share the song with you, for free, even if theoretically it's illegal.

I can't emphasize enough how cool the video courses from The Teaching CompanyThe Great Courses are. They are in the format of a university course, but no one is there to take notes so the pace of presentation is natural, it is all recorded on video. No black or white boards, either, as the visualizations of what the presenter is saying are added later via computer. Most courses have from 10 to 40 lectures, all in an easy to understand language, but no trace of the ridiculous tricks and populist stupidities in TV documentaries.

This course - Mysteries of the Microscopic World, presented by Bruce E. Fleury - in particular is very interesting, as it discusses microorganisms in relation to human culture. Especially interesting are lectures 11 to 13, discussing the hideous pandemic of 1918, of which nobody seems to be talking or making heroic movies about or even remember, even if it killed from 50 to 100 million people. In comparison, first world war killed a measly 8.5 million. Why is that? Is it as Dr. Fleury suggests, that the pandemic was a horrible and completely unstoppable phenomenon from which no one felt they had escaped or in face of which there were no heroes? I find this almost as disgusting as the disease itself, that people would only want to document their triumphs.

Anyway, for an old guy, Bruce is a funny man. He is very eloquent and not at all boring, despite his fears. The course goes from explaining what microorganisms are, how they evolved, the perpetual arms race against other organisms, including us, how they influenced history and even how they were used in biological warfare, AIDS and even allergies, all in 24 lectures. I think a lot of information in this course is something unlikely for you to have accidentally overheard or to have been exposed to, therefore of high quality.

As an additional bonus, you get to understand not only the evolution of medicine, but of all the quack snake oil ideas that are periodically emerging in "naive populations", truly epidemics in their own right, and even the source of some of the most common sayings and symbols. For example the symbol of medicine has little to do with the wisdom of snakes, but more with the procedure to remove nematode worms from someone's flesh by wrapping them slowly around a stick.

All in all a wonderful course, created and presented by a guy who is clearly adverse to bullshit and who has read and has worked quite a bit to make it. Give it a try!

Happy New Year, everybody! A new year is starting and, with it, a lot of TV shows start and meet their demise. It is time to tell you what I've watched - as community service for you, of course :) - and what I think about them.



Let's start with the already described ones:

• Doctor Who - The new season with Capaldi in the role of the 13th doctor has not started yet, but there were the 50th anniversary of the show, which pretty much saved Gallifrey and showed all the Doctors so far and even a bit of the new one, then the usual Christmas special, where Gallifrey saved The Doctor. Kind of a quid pro quo. Anyway, it seems to me that in less than 9 years they added at least 600 years to the venerable age of The Doctor. Soon he will become older than The Face of Bo, if he continues that way :)
• True Blood - I will be watching the new season, but I don't have much hopes for the show now. It was good while it lasted, though.
• The Good Wife - The old formula of the show started squeaking, as I was observing the last TV series post, so they cooked up something else. Alicia is leaving the company to form her own, to the dismay and hurt of Will, who is now intent on making her hurt back. A game of legal cat and mouse ensues (see what I did there?). It is a breath of fresh air for the show, but I don't know how much it can last. Will's character cannot maintain its value if he loses to Alicia in court all day.
• Haven - the fourth season sees sheriff Carter from Eureka be a psychotic bad guy. Good for him. They finally defeat him only to find a very changed Audrey Parker. Parker and Carter sitting in a tree...
• Southpark - Southpark had some very funny episodes lately. Not the best, but pretty cool.
• Homeland - Season three was weird. High tension, quick turns of the situation, great acting. Unfortunately the characters themselves lost their charisma and empathy value. I had no idea why anyone did what they did, even when they explained it several times. Not that it is confusing, I just can't relate to the characters. The end of the season made me think it was the end of the show, but it seems there will be a fourth.
• The Walking Dead - A plague, the Governor returning for a while and a lot of the characters leaving or dying. This can be good for the show, as some sort of renewal was desperately needed, but we'll have to see how it goes...
• Game of Thrones - waiting for the new season. There is a lot of tension about Martin not writing his books fast enough. The show is going to catch up and then what?
• Copper - Copper got cancelled. It kind of deserved it, though, after a boring and pointless second season.
• Arrow - I spoke too soon. I kind of like Arrow. I have no good reason for it, but there are a lot of characters, beautiful women, weird magical stuff that has nothing to do with logic and they even added Flash in the series. What I am most happy about, enough to take it from the notwant list, is the return of Manu Bennett, who I noticed in Spartacus as being a very good actor.
• Elementary - New dynamic. Lucy Liu's character is getting more and more attention as Sherlock himself starts to show all kinds of vulnerabilities and a human side. It works, I think, but they'd better not push it too much.
• The Tomorrow People (2013) - Ridiculously good looking actors also have superpowers, while being hunted by an evil agency. I am glad the show changed almost everything else in this remake, but the show could use more logic in it.
• The Legend of Korra - The second season ended in victory for the forces of good, naturally, but a bit better than it started. Korra seems to slowly mature. Really slowly.
• Rewind - A strange move to cancel this show after its pilot aired. It was a promising one, even if the base concept was a bit too morally unstable.
• Serangoon Road - The first season ended and I had the feeling of loss and of wanting more that indicates I really liked the show and its characters. There are a lot more facets of the world in it to be explored and I eagerly await the second season.
• Siberia - Siberia got cancelled and for good reasons, I think. I stopped watching it anyway.
• Sleepy Hollow - Magic, witches demons and American history. The concept could have gone in so many ways, all good, but they chose the melodramatic way.
• The Bridge - Interesting show, but I wonder how they intend to continue it in the second season, since all the major story arches of the first one got completed.
• The Originals - I am close to stopping watching it. It feels like Dynasty with vampires.
• The Psychopath Next Door - I really liked how this started, but it seems the pilot got converted into a movie and that was the end of it. Too bad!
• Under The Dome - I want to believe that King's story was better than this watered down, incoherent crap. I may stop watching it altogether.
• Witches of East End - The show got a little darker, but only a little. New characters and connections appear, but not much of a show besides the eye candy.
• The Last Witch - I liked the first episode, but there was no second. I really want this to be picked up for a series, but I don't know if it didn't or the plan to continue it later or what...

And the new or restarted shows:

• Marvel's agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - A show that combines the idea of superheroes that seems to stick nicely to the public with the one about a good government agency: S.H.I.E.L.D. Their purpose: to police the entire world in order to protect it from itself and contamination from alien technology. I can't possibly subscribe to the mission statement, but the show is decent.
• Dracula - What started as a ridiculous concept caught up with me. Dracula is no angel, but he fights an even darker agency: the order Draco. Everybody is a bit conspiratorial and over dramatic, but I like the show so far.
• Killer Women - An US remake of an Argentinian show, it features Tricia Helfer as a Ranger! She uses her womanly powers to fight crime, alas. I really hoped for a better premise. I would predict the show is going to be cancelled pretty quickly, as woman police shows usually get, but I could be wrong, seeing that is a remake of another show, so at least part of it should stick to audiences.
• Misfits - Misfits ended. It was a nice show, but a little too pointless. I will still recommend you watch the first seasons.
• Ripper Street - This show was also cancelled, after just two seasons. Me and an entire bunch of people protested against its cancellation because it was a good show! A bit inconsistent, true, but good actors and a nice starting point. Bring it back, you wankers!
• Wizards vs Aliens - Yes! The second season of the show features yet again wizards taking a stand about the alien hungering for magic: the Necross! There is even an episode about the world where magic originates, where the wizard kid and the female Necross (there transformed into a woman) live together and have a child. Is that weird or what? :)
• Sherlock - The third season of the British reinvention of the Holmes mythos just started. I am going to watch it, but as you may remember, I don't particularly like the way they did it, even if it stars Benedict Cumberbatch.
• Ghost in the Shell: Arise - I watched the second episode of this Japanese anime series. If you don't know what Ghost in the Shell is, you should start watching it immediately. Arise is just a reinvention of the series, with better graphics and a change in technology and character stories. It doesn't seem to be as poignant as the films or the Stand Alone Complex series, but it may change in the future.
• A Young Doctor's Notebook and Other Stories - The second season appeared! Just like the first, four episodes of 20 minutes each. This time the humor is almost not present, instead terrible despair. The main character's ... err.. character is so awful and pathetic that even the viewer has to loathe him. His older alter ego is prepared to forgive him, only even he can't! A very good show, with a completely different structure and feel from anything I've seen so far.

There have been a lot of new shows lately, but many of them I just skimmed or downright refused to even try.

I am writing this post because I sometimes get fed up with all these self-righteous people who explain to me, condescendingly of course, what "real" means and how important it is compared to what I may be doing, which has a lower value of reality, often approaching zero. I am hearing that texting or using an instant messenger is not carrying a conversation. That love is attention and that I should always focus that attention on one thing or another (mainly on their person, though). I watch too many movies instead of going out to parties, I read books instead of talking walks, I throw myself into an online game or some news item instead of noticing to my wife's needs, I stay indoors instead of going out. You see, for these people, going outside the home, physically interacting with other humans with no hope of escape and watching events unfold with your eyes (smell them with your nose, touch them with your own skin) rather than seeing them on a screen is what is "real". Well, I am here to tell you all: bullshit! There is no such thing as real since the time a brain was invented.

Now, I could be as condescending as these people are and explain to you how neurologically a brain is trying to project the world, as perceived by the senses, so that it can fit in the head and can simulate events before they happen, thus leading to informed decisions. Or I could bore you to death by demonstrating that two people can never ever have access to the same reality. I won't do that, though :) What I will do is just give you some counter-examples that will prove, I hope, that there was never a common reality to begin with and that technology only enables a process that is too old and too human to ever stop.

When I was a child my parents were thinking that going out would be good for me. I, however, wanted to stay indoors and read books. Not on a PDA or on a computer, but on actual paper, the only things that were then available to me in Romania. They would talk to me, you see, ask me to come to lunch, or ask me a question or try to interact with me for some reason or another. I, however, was lost 20000 leagues under the sea or on some alien planet or in some cave, running from a crazed killer. I couldn't hear them. More, I didn't really want to. They could, of course, smack me in the head and that would certainly feel more real than what was in the book, but does that mean it was not real to begin with? And I will have to say that, even if some written scenario was complete fantasy, I was interacting with it, remembering it, training my mind on it, maybe even believing it could be real or that it was real already. The contents of the book were changing my personality and my knowledge and, on any further "real" interactions with other people, changed them a bit, too. It's the same thing as believing the things said in an electoral campaign and then changing your life's course to account for that. At least sci-fi has a small chance to happen!

My point is that the process of losing myself into a parallel world, whether of my own creation or somebody else's, is something that people have been doing for a long time. Technology is not creating this phenomenon, it only enables it.

And then there is the hypocrisy. Some fantasy book is something not real and I should do something that counts, you say, but you don't have the balls to say the same thing to a religious nut who advocates prayer every Sunday (or perhaps a small war). That would be insensitive to their beliefs, you say then. They have the right to lose themselves in a complete fabrication because they are not the only ones. There is a whole pack ready to tear you to bits if you try to stop it. I have news to you! The readers of books may not be a tight knit pack, but their set includes the set of people who read religious books and believe in them, too. The book readers group is a lot bigger, if a less ferocious, tribe. We are not to be feared, but that doesn't mean you are not insensitive to us.

So now it is easier to watch a movie or a series to become lost in some fantastic universe. It is easier to split communication into small text bits that are sent only when and where you want them. It is a lot easier to imagine you are in a circle of friends, even if you've never actually met most of them. Is that bad? It's like accusing the inventor of writing of making people listen less to other people speak. Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating replacing the old and tried methods of human interaction with technological means; I am instead revolting against attempts to limit the methods I find best for me.

And literary fantasy is not necessarily the stuff that shapes your thoughts for a while. It can be something acutely technical, like a recipe for cake, or a legal contract, or a video explaining how to do something. Neither are "real", they are just information. Then comes your decision to bake the cake, memorize the recipe or just forget the whole thing. And when has anything you've read in a legal contract have anything to do with reality?

I believe that all this propaganda for the concept of reality - itself just a fantasy of the accuser - is used to hide a more brutal thing, one that is harder to accept. I submit to you that when someone prefers to read a book or watch a movie rather than talk to you, it is because you are less interesting. When children prefer to text on their smartphones while ignoring their parents, it's because their parents are boring. When someone prefers indoor activities to outdoor activities, it's because the things you did outside when you were young, the things that made you feel healthy and proud, are becoming less and less relevant. A conversation is two-sided only and continuous only if both participants are incredibly interesting, otherwise there are other options now. Eye contact doesn't communicate the amount and quality of information that makes it worthwhile anymore. And love, the ultimate feeling, the thing that makes the world go round, the stuff of dreams and fairy tales, love just has to be of a certain quality nowadays before it becomes attractive. Reality is boring, it's the low bandwidth information flow of yesterday, the only people living almost exclusively in it are termed savages and peasants and other derogatory terms that you don't want attached to you. Be Zen! Be aware of and absorb everything that is happening to you, instead of choosing the things you want to see and hear and not smell. What pretentious crap!

Learning is now multithreaded, a web of fantasy and fact that just comes at you from all directions and that needs you to determine at every step how reliable, interesting or "real" it is. Other people are just data points and tools to help you achieve goals. Friendship is distributed. Identity is multiple and depends on context. People choose to live in fantasies now, because they can do it easier and better than before, when they still would have chosen it, but they didn't quite knew how. There is an app for everything because we thought of it first, someone created the app and people find the need to use it.

Technology does not ultimately change humanity in unwanted directions because technology has no desires. If humanity changes - or gives technology desires :), it is because it chooses so. It might be a bad choice, but it's a choice nonetheless. And people that find themselves overwhelmed by that choice should refrain from trying to rebrand past as reality.

There are situations where a program would display an error of the type "Libeay32.dll Not Found" or "This application failed to start because libeay32.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem." I had this problem with SpeedFan, for example, which would display this error on startup, but then start without a hitch after closing the popup. There are a lot of solutions on the net, but the safest and quickest (for Speedfan and probably most other programs) is to do the following:

1. Obtain a copy of the libeay32.dll file
2. Copy the file in the Speedfan folder in Program Files
3. Restart Speedfan

. You might prefer to reinstall the offending program, which is probably the best general solution, but you could lose some custom configurations or data or, as in the case of Speedfan, it might not work!

As for the obtaining, you probably have several copies of the library on your computer anyway. Just search for it in Program Files, I had a bunch of them and chose the one that was newest. You could copy the file thus found in Windows\System32, but that would not be the best idea, as it might interfere with all programs looking for the library, so it is safer to copy it only in the folder of the program that causes the error to occur.

For an explanation, I understand libeay32 is an OpenSSL library, something that is free, open source and used for Secure Sockets Layer - a protocol widely used on the Internet. Therefore you will find all kinds of versions, in all kinds of bundles. It might even be a malware, in some cases, so make sure it isn't before copying it around ;) Also, the reason why Speedfan would start anyway, even without the library, is that it was used only in the context of sending secure mail, a feature I have never used.

I read about Dark Universe online, in a "best" sci-fi book list from somewhere. Richard Dawkins recommended it as a very good book and one of his favourites. I can see why the book would appeal to Dawkins, perhaps he even read it when he was a child. The idea is that the book is classical pulp fiction; the characters are simple and undeveloped, the logic strained and the science only consistent with the times in which it was written. At first, when I started reading, I was captivated by the world of people living underground after a nuclear apocalypse, but then I started getting more and more annoyed with the leaps of logic and superficial characterisation. I thought it was a book written by a teenager, like Eragon maybe, but instead it was written by a grown man in the 50s. When I learned about this I understood more of why the book existed at all and why people seemed so... stupid and onetracked. The ending, something that almost offended me, not by its quality - which wasn't good to begin with, but by its implications, is classic 1950 "scientific" thinking. The hope of humanity as small minded arrogant assholes.

Bottom line, it is a simple and easy to read book, in a bad way. The science for it is lacking, the characters are simplistic and the plot classic pulp (prince and princess kind of crap). Too bad that a good initial concept was wasted by a mediocre writer in a mediocre time.

I have not read any of China Miéville's works, but I have received a positive recommendation from a friend and decided to read The City and The City, thinking that I would read a science-fiction story. Instead, it is a fiction filled police procedural - a detective story - placed in a city that is, at the same time, part of two different countries. There is a detective, set on finding the murderers of a young girl, who during his investigations takes the reader through the internal workings of this weird place and leaves us with the concept that we all, as city dwellers, are silently and cooperatively complicit in the evil perpetrated around us. Interesting, indeed, but quite a shallow concept to be transformed into a book, even one written by such an obvious talent as Miéville. There is also a sad reason why he wrote the book such, as a present to his terminally ill mother who enjoyed detective stories.

But back to the book. It is fascinating to observe a place where an establishment, a person or even an object are part of one city or another based on physical characteristics such as certain colours, a certain gait or a certain way to make a common gesture. This idea is the soul of the book and the rest just a pretext to explore it. Anyone breaking the boundaries between the two cities is immediately and absolutely punished by a shadow entity called Breach, which appears next to anyone even focusing too long on a place from the other city and maintains the "skin" between the two different nations. Miéville does not explain, really, what caused such a split, why Breach was formed and even how it does what it does (and indeed, how it did the same thing for thousands of years). The point of the book is not to root into reality the concept of this shattered place, only to explore its possibility. And it does this skilfully. The issue I had with the book is that, except for this brilliant and original idea, you are reading a police procedural, plain and simple. I was in the mood for something else, perhaps.

My conclusion is that it is a very well written book, one that is worth reading, but not something that could be considered brilliant except for the seed idea. Outside that idea, which has been pretty much detailed in this post, the plot is a standard detective story.

I was first directed to Esther Friesner by the excellent audio reading of The Shunned Trailer, a short story which humorously and skilfully combines Ivy League competitiveness with Lovecraftian mythos. You can (and should) listen to it on the also excellent podcast site EscapePod, which together with its sister sites Pseudopod and Podcastle provide free weekly audio stories from the genres of sci-fi, horror and fantasy, respectively. The story itself was so amusing to me that I actually laughed out loud, which - for those so blissfully unaware of it - is not the same thing as LOLing. I made a short foiree into some Lovecraft stories, then proceeded on reading something of Friesner's.

Druid's Blood is an alternate universe Sherlock Holmes story. The "alternate" in the universe is an England where the druids repelled the Romans by using magic and then went on protecting the British isles with a magical shield that prohibits the entry of - for lack of a better word - contraband. This includes, for example, steel. It is an interesting modern bronze age world in which the druids are the highest religious order, everything is run by magic, technology is pretty much forbidden, but the Brits still have their high ideals, the monarchy and Sherlock Holmes. The irony is thick when the work comes from an American author.

Anyway, I don't want to spoil the story; you have to read it for yourself, but I recommend it highly. The first chapter is not so good, so I suggest you go through it even if you are not terribly enthusiastic about it. The rest, though, made me not let the book out of my hands - to my wife's chagrin. Not as funny as The Shunned Trailer (after all, it was not intended as a parody) it combines several famous ideas and characters with this twisted history of a magical Britain. The book is not meant as an exploration of history, though, as the characters and references are not really meant to have been contemporary or explainable by small tweaks in the time stream. I liked the book, although I don't know if I want to read more of the author right now. She is certainly smart and funny, but even if I enjoyed the book tremendously, it couldn't reach the level of good fun and concentrated smarts that The Shunned Trailer seemed to be. As such, I recommend reading the book first, then listen to the podcast of The Shunned Trailer. Perhaps in this order, the pleasure level will be higher.

There has been a lot of discussion on the changing of the names of Sherlock Holmes and doctor Watson. Whether it was a form of respect to the original characters to change their names if you change their entire world or whether it was a copyrighting issue or some other motive, I see no reason to dwell on the matter. After all, the epilogue is a tip of the hat to doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented a character of such incredible skill and intelligence, only to relegate his own role to the faithful sidekick. Enjoy the book.

It is difficult for me to not admire Lovecraft and at the same time just as difficult to fully enjoy his stories. He was admirable because he was a true horror writer, haunted by his dark visions so completely that a lot of his stories are set in the same world, undoubtedly filling his mind at all times. And it is difficult to enjoy his stories because the horror feeling in his books comes from a very subjective and I dare say outdated place in the human mind. Most of his characters attribute adjectives like "abhorrent" or "grotesque" to mere shapes or smells and they actively attempt to filter out anything that might challenge their peace of mind and established world order. That's a silly and disgusting thing to do, I think, and perhaps this is what repels me most from writings of "the master".

But let me tell you of At the Mountains of Madness. The first thing that came into mind when I started reading it was "The Thing". It is placed in Antarctica where an expedition finds some frozen aliens who then defrost. There is even mention of shapeless things that can assume any form or function. Of course, this is as much as the similarities go. First and foremost the story is told by a scientist, in the pompous and highly descriptive manner in which most Lovecraftian work is written. This geologist, one of the few survivors, decides to write a more detailed account of what happened in view of a new expedition organized to go in the same region. His motive, and here is where I scoff the most, is to dissuade people to ever go there again, as some things are too horrible and evil to be explored by man. Say what? How is that guy a scientist? Anyway, he writes this as to fill in the gaps that he consciously and deliberately left out when he returned from the expedition, all of its members sworn to secrecy on some aspects of the trip. He sounds more like the leader of a cult than a member of a scientific group, doesn't he?

The end is more satisfying, though, where even Lovecraft's roundabout and subjective exposition has to give when describing the things they actually discover, explore then run away from. Even if I cannot abide the motivations of his characters or enjoy the way things are made more or less horrible or grotesque by their close minded whims, I have to declare some affection to the universe Lovecraft describes and perhaps some lingering interest on what one could make of it.

And indeed, people have been trying to resurrect Lovecraft's work in various ways: board games, graphic novels, sequels and prequels, movies. I seem to remember a 2005 movie that I liked, made after The Call of Cthulhu, but even that was made as a silent black and white film using the exact text from the story. And even if it achieved its goals of bringing Lovecraft's work to the screen, it did nothing to make it less dated or more accessible to a modern audience. Guillermo del Toro wanted to make a movie after At the Mountains of Madness, but he was deflected by film studios and his other work, mainly Prometheus. Del Toro even said that he would not make the ATMOM adaptation because it would have the same premise and twist as Prometheus. I am not so sure they should have been similar, but hey, that's how he saw it. What I am trying to say here is that modernizing Lovecraft for the present audience takes most of the love out of the craft :) Even this novella, which was a little bit longer than a short story, had so much roundabout storytelling and filler descriptions that if you took them away you would remain with a skeleton idea that could mould over anything.

So, my conclusion is that At the Mountains of Madness is one of the most accessible Lovecraft writings. It seems less dated than others and actually brings some clear descriptions of what is going on, not just randomly used adjectives testifying to the bizarre mental state of the characters. I can see no way to modernize or take the story and bring it to a modern audience without breaking the plot and turning it into something else, so if you want to experience it, you need to read the novella. It's relatively short so it shouldn't take much, unless you find it hard to go past the most descriptive parts without falling asleep, as I have.

Ripper Street appeared at the same approximate moment with another similar series, Copper, also a historical series about policemen made by the BBC. The Ripper Street inspector is a man of justice, but also one that believes in the process of finding proof and sending the guilty to trial, which is relatively the same with the guy in Copper, who was a little more violent, but basically good stock. He employs (not unlike Copper) a doctor that is using scientific methods to determine the cause of death and other details that help in the investigation. His love life is in shambles as he mourns the death of his daughter, just like in Copper. A lot of the script also revolves around a female brothel owner, beset by financial troubles, but that ultimately proves ruthless. And also both series have ended abruptly, just before the second season's finale. This similarity can't be coincidental and it bothers me to no end that they used the same scheme for two different markets, just to see how it will work, with TV viewers as lab rats for their experiment.

But there are also differences. While the Five Points violent stage for Copper was more appropriate for the genre than East London after Jack the Ripper's case, the lead was never terribly charismatic. He seemed like a nice good looking Irish boy who was way over his head as a policeman. Instead, in Ripper Street Matthew Macfadyen uses his deep baritone voice and intimidating presence to portray perfectly the driven inspector Edmund Reid. Also, while the support cast for Copper did their job rather well, none seem to reach the height of theatrical performance that Jerome Flynn brings to Ripper Street while playing the violent but good willing police sergeant. And the final nail in the coffin for Copper is that most of the issues of the lead character are personal in nature, while the inspector in Ripper Street is tortured by his personal life failings, but is loyal to his job as a policeman.

Perhaps Ripper Street started with a promise of bringing light on the good of people in a hellish corner of the world, but in the end managed to do the opposite. In truth, the last scene of the series (and you might want to skip this slight spoiler if you plan to watch the series) is with the woman who loved the inspector turning in disgust when she sees him order his sergeant to kill a man in order to bring justice outside the system. In fact the last scene shows him betray all at once everything he stood for during the entire series. It's a slip up, of course, driven by desperation and something that would have probably been thoroughly explored in the third season. Alas, there is no third season to be had, for reasons of decreasing audience. It is difficult to pretend to be the best television producer in the world and then only care about audiences, like the assholes across the ocean, BBC!

The inconsistency in the show's quality can be blamed for the cancellation of the show, as well, but overall Ripper Street was entertaining and thought provoking. It could have been better, but not by much, I think. Good cast, good atmosphere of the old East End, some pretty compelling scripts. I believe it a shame to stop the show now. It was clearly better than Copper and that show had two seasons as well. Ripper Street deserved better, as well as all the viewers hooked on it.

I've just finished the eighth episode of the fifth season of Misfits, the last in the series, as the show finally reached its end. I am convinced that most of the people reading this post don't really know what Misfits is and I mean to rectify that. Be warned, this is not the epitome of television and the last seasons were rather disappointing compared with the first few, but those few were pretty refreshing for a TV show.

Misfits is a British TV show about superheroes. Unlike American heroes, who are all beautiful and good and perfect, the first batch of Misfits superheroes is a bunch of losers on community service that get caught in a freak storm that gives them "powers". They use those powers in the most outrageous ways, completely out of control and with a tendency to think only of themselves and accidentally kill probation workers. Unfortunately it is the most consistent trend through the series, as actors change from season to season and the mood and quality of the show oscillates wildly.

My point, though, is that the show has a very nice premise and its worst problem was that instead of focusing on character development, they tried to ramp it up, adding more people with powers and gradually increasing the danger and weirdness of the situations in which they were involved until it just became ridiculous.

I don't know (or care) about ratings, but for me a nice show would have pitted these few guys against the real world, not a weird (and ultimately meaningless) version of itself where a lot of people have superpowers, but nobody notices. I repeat myself, but the idea of normal blokes and girls having superpowers and acting like normal people while they have them was a great one and the show creators should have followed it through. Too bad they didn't.

To wrap this out, I highly recommend to sci-fi fans watching the first two seasons of Misfits. Its... britishness... brings a refreshing perspective to an already overloaded and tired genre of the superhero and not getting exposed, even a little, to Misfits makes you miss out on a nice and unfortunately shortlived slice of the mythos.

I really wanted to give you a compilation of the best moment in Misfits, but apparently YouTube is infested by "Best funny moments of Nathan" which is the rude Irish pretty boy from the first season. Instead I leave you with the trailer for the series:

You have to appreciate The Witcher for at least two major reasons: one is that it is based on a series of books by a Polish author and second is that it is made almost exclusively by Polish programmers and software managers. It is basically Polish software, and for that the quality is really great. Not that I disconsider software coming from the country, but I imagine they have a lot less resources than major American game studios, for example.

The story is that of a witcher, a monster slayer. He has tremendous physical strength and can use magic thanks to magical and genetic changes that have transformed him into a sterile mutant. He is basically the Caucazian version of Blade, if you want. I have not read the stories, but from what I've heard they are rather morally ambiguous, featuring the witcher drinking and whoring like a madman in between monster slaying bouts. The game attempts to do the same thing, of course with the sex and foul language removed, as it would have been too gruesome among all the blood, gore and violence. (I was sarcastic there, in case you didn't see it, people in charge with the moral development of our society!)

In fact the concept of the game is marvelous: have a character that can make choices that affect the overall story in a fantasy game of feudal monsters and courtly intrigue. However, in order to do so, you must go on endless quests gathering this and that, running around like a marathoner on steroids (which I guess you are, with all the genetic alterations and potions). The poor guy runs so much that one gets tired just watching him move. That was the major issue I had with the game, over 70% of it is running around (and 10% animations).

The fighting style was intriguing, but ultimately annoying. You had to click on the monster you wanted to kill, then wait for a specific moment when the cursor changed in order to click again and perform a combo. Up to six clicks can build a combo, which gives the player a lot of opportunity to click on somebody else, click next to the monster or move the camera in a way in which it is temporarily impossible to fight. Also Gerald does not have automatic fighting, so unless you tell him to attack, he just sits there and takes it. The damn clicks make you feel you are doing something, though, which I guess is a plus.

You get to meet a lot of damsels in distress which you have the option of helping. Once you do that they are remarkably willing to discard their clothes for you. In that situation you get to see... a nicely drawn card of a partially naked woman representing the sexual act. Then you return to where you were... at the same hour... dressed... which makes one think of a problem with the witcher's endurance, so to speak.

The changes in storyline are interesting, and some of them don't seem to happen until they have had time to propagate. This means you cannot just save, make a choice, see what happens and load, as there is a long time between choice and effect. This also means you will have to play the game a lot just to see only one story line. You will probably have to Google for all the outcomes. I, as always, was a perfect gentleman. No matter how ugly that Adda chick was, I still slept next to her... twice... and of course we remained best friends. No, really, there is something seriously wrong with me.

Overall it is a pretty entertaining and captivating game. The end chapter (the fifth, if you are wondering) is fraught with animations and it seems you have nothing else to do but move a bit, see a movie, move a little bit, kill some guy, another movie and so on. The fight with Javed was the most difficult, I think, with the rest a complete breeze once I had upgraded the Igni spell to the maximum power.

I have, however, the certainty that with a simple hack to allow a person to click on the map and get there at warp speed (maybe stop if there is a monster on the road or something) this game would have been three times shorter and a lot more fun. I started with a lot of expectations about it, though, and maybe that is why I felt a little disappointed, especially with the "boss" fights which seemed to involve a lot of talking and hiding behind minions until I got to them and very easily kicked their ass.

Time to play The Witcher II, I guess! I leave you with a video review of the game.



Also, for more information about the Witcher, like the choices you can make and the consequences or the quests you never got around to finishing, go to the Witcher Wiki

I tried to find a title with more impact than the title of the original article to express my combination of amusement and disdain; I couldn't. It says almost everything. Apparently, the reason why the nuke codes were reset was that US Strategic Command generals almost immediately had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000 to ensure that the missiles were ready for use regardless of whether the president was available to give authorization.. How insane is that? On the other hand, there is a positive side to all this: it goes to show that you are just as intelligent as an US general when you leave your phone PIN to the default 0000.

  Oh, what a wonderful book this was. A cross between a William Gibson and a Peter F. Hamilton book, Accelerando was like a cyberpunk's wet dream. Not only it describes the deep transformations of our culture caused by the increasing power and speed of computation, but it goes further, years, decades, centuries and millennia more. You know the feeling you get when you get close to the end of a book and you sigh "Oh, I wish it would continue to tell the story"? It happens at the end of every chapter. It's like Stross could have ended the book at any point, but he chose to continue the story until its satisfyingly circular end. What is it with writers and the return to origins, anyway? There is an explanation for the structure of the book, as the author originally published each chapter as a separate story.

  What is even nicer is that the story doesn't skim the details, showing only superficial bits that further the story, but it goes into everything: cybernetics, economy, ethics, law, the nature of consciousness. It gets frightening at some points when you realize that in the situations depicted in the book reality would be even more carnivorous and that your own individuality (held coherent in the book for the benefit of the reader) is just an illusion we cling to, ready to dispel when we muster the courage (or the insanity) to let it go.

  I also liked how, while it was human-centric, the book did not limit itself to one species, nor did it go the way of accelerating (pardon the pun) until the whole story becomes meaningless in some encounter with a God like alien or by complete transcendence. I have to say I appreciate Stross immensely for not doing so, which is the normal and easiest way for a geek to end such a story: by generalizing the hell out of the situation until no particulars make sense. In that, the writer showed real restraint and mature wisdom. It makes me want to read all of his books.

  If you want to know what the plot is, you will have to read the book, as I can't really do it justice here. I can tell you that it made me believe in an explosive evolution of the human race in my lifetime more than any Kurzweil discourse and it did it easily, by simple measuring MIPS/gram on the scale of the entire Solar System. If we will run Moore's Law for a few more decades, it will make enormous sense that "dumb matter" is done for. It is a fantastic vision of computation as a devourer of mass, a frightening equation akin to Einstein's matter to energy conversion. Did I mention that it also - convincingly - explains Fermi's paradox, much more so than "we get to build androids for sex", which was the most believable for me so far?

  Needless to say it, but I will anyway: go read it, read it now! It is an amazing book. It is a little too pretentious in some parts, when it bombards your brain with technobabble just so it gets you "future-shocked" enough to understand the characters, but what cyberpunk fan doesn't eat that up, anyway? Also the familial connections in the book are a bit too overdone, but then again, they provide the generational point of view necessary to describe centuries of human evolution. There is a page - surprisingly Web 0.9 for such a plot :) - for the book, with an extract from the first chapter, but I don't think it is representative for the entire work.

You can actually read the book online for free, from the author's site: Accelerando

I work in this silly place where everything must be done according to some plan or procedure. They aren't even very good at it, but they are very proud of this bureaucracy. For example I don't have Outlook installed on my work machine, but on a virtual one which is in a different network and can be accessed only by remote desktop protocol. Some admin with a God complex thought it was a good idea to make the computer lock itself after a few minutes of idleness and even close the entire virtual machine when no one accesses it for a while. This might have some sick sense in the admin's head, but I need to know when an email arrives and so I would like to have this virtual machine open on the second monitor without having to enter the password every 5 minutes. To add hurt to offence, I cannot install any software on the virtual machine or using Powershell to prevent the computer going idle or anything useful like that. Good, a challenge! I need to find a way to keep the remote desktop session alive.

Enter Windows Script Hosting. I've created a small Javascript file that gets executed by the machine and occasionally moves the mouse and simulates pressing Shift. No more idleness and no need to access Group Policy or install anything. Just create a text file and paste the following code and then save it with a .js extension, then run it. It will keep the computer from going idle.

var WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
for (var i=0; i<60; i++) // 60 minutes
{
WshShell.SendKeys('+');
WScript.Sleep (60000);
}

Step by step instructions for non technical people:

1. Press the Windows key and E to start the Windows Explorer
2. In the Explorer, navigate to Desktop
3. Remove the setting for "Hide extensions for known file types" - this is done differently from Windows version to Windows version, so google it
4. Create a new text file on the desktop by right clicking in it and choosing "New Text Document"
5. Paste the code above in it
6. Save the file (if you successfully removed the setting at point 3, you should not only see the name, but also the .txt extension for the file)
7. Rename the file to busybee.js (or any name, as long as it ends with .js
8. Double click it

The script will run 60 times at every minute (so for an hour) and keep the machine on which it runs on from going idle. Enjoy!