Exultant, the second book in the Destiny's Children series felt a lot better than Coalescent. Not without its own flaws, it made the entire experience better, but maybe that's just me.
The book describes a universe twenty thousand years into the future, when human kind has infested the galaxy, destroying all sentient races they encountered with their immense war machine. They are currently at war with a technologically superior enemy called the Xeelee, which are trapped at the core of the galaxy, pushed back by the sheer size of human forces. The war has waged for 3000 years and continues with no advancement of any kind, with the entire human philosophy focused on spewing more and more cannon fodder for a war that is neither to be won or lost, just endured.
A rather bleak vision of the future, but fear not, there comes hope! Somehow, an excentric aristocrat comes with all the ideas and resources to create the ultimate weapon that will destroy the Xeelee! And in the pages of the book it is described how they go at it. This is where the book actually fails, because at a such immense space and time scale, a solution of this simplicity is just not believable. You don't feel it in your GUT! But the book is well written, the style bringing memories of Asimov, and the ideas in it pretty interesting.
Stephen Baxter is again applying Universal Darwinism to his universe, bringing more and more species and types of lifeforms out of his magician hat. The ending of the book is terribly naive, but without a bit of naivite, you cannot finish great space sagas in a single book.
Bottom line: if you like space fights, military stratagems, character development, time travel, large scale galactic intrigues and a lot of techno babble (and I know I do! :) ) you will love this book. I do think that some of the great ideas in the book would have mixed nicely with late David Feintuch's writing. Anyway, on with the next book in the series: Transcendent
In 1973, Frank Herbert wrote a book called Hellstrom's Hive in which it described a sect of people that lived underground, in a system much alike insects, with individuals specialised for different tasks and all living for the big hive organism. The book did not explain how it all got there, it just quickly described the situation and then delved into the action.
Jump to Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, the first book of the Destiny's Children series, which pretty much details how a group of humans would reach a plausible hive like society. Unfortunately, the book is more descriptive than anything else, failing to deliver in the action part. A lot of characters are developed and a lot of history (both personal and general) is detailed, but in the end the characters vanish as if they never mattered. It is, after all, the whole point of the novel, that ignorant individuals following certain rules lead to the emergence of patterns, but it did not fit well within a book.
Not that the book itself is not fascinating and well written, because it is, but the pace is very slow at the beginning, accelerating to a snail pace in the end, while the different parts of the book seem fractured, too little related to one another. I intend to read the rest of the books in the series, but I might just give up, too.
Bottom line, I think it would be a nice read to start with Coalescent and then read Hellstrom's Hive, although I do think the second book to be much better.
I really like Korn, they are heavy, melodic and the lead singer is pretty unique. I haven't posted anything by them yet because I was a teenager when I was listening to them. I remembered loving the video for Falling Away from Me and wanted to share it with my bloggies :).
Update 24 Aug 2013: SyFy rejected the Blake's 7 idea. That may be a good thing, though, as it apparently was taken by Microsoft, to be made as an XBox series.
When I was a very young boy, during the Romanian communist era, the only entertainment available was the Bulgarian television (also a communist country, but with a more relaxed regime) who's signal would reach Bucharest to the delight of many. I have always remembered vaguely a British series called Blake's 7, a sci-fi show that I've enjoyed tremendously at the time. Recently I was reminded of it and I was lucky enough to find the torrent for all four seasons. Having watched it now, I have mixed feelings and a new understanding of my child mind.
A short description of the show first. Imagine a team of space wanderers a little in the style of Farscape's crew (civilians, each one with their own ideas and motivations), stuck in a universe that resembles the Star Wars universe (an oppressive Federation ruling the galaxy with an iron fist) and has similar effects and inspiration as Star Trek TOS. All this with a budget that was probably several levels of magnitude smaller than that of ST TOS and also with effects and script a whole lot cheesier (and by that I mean that if I work out the percentages, more than half of the show was just cheese). The actors themselves were British and Welsh TV theater actors and they behaved as such the whole series. Not that it wasn't a refreshing perspective, even now. It was actually original enough and if it weren't for the production values, it might have been a world class classic.
Of course, I didn't watch it now because of the cinematographic value, but because it meant so much to me when I was a child. And I was stunned to see that the things that I remembered fascinated me were quite different in the show. Some weren't even there. For example I remembered that the show was called Blake's 7 but that one of them died in the second episode, which I attributed to British humour. But no, that happened at the beginning of season two. The introduction and music I remembered to be dark, impressive and scary. They were really funny now. There were scenes I remembered in a completely different way, with more emotion and action and the things that happened in the show had another sense altogether.
The structure of the series is funny to follow. The crew of seven was always only of six people. The computer counted as the 7th man. In the second season Gant dies so they are temporarily left with only 6. In the third season Blake leaves the show as well as others of the crew, only to be replaced by other actors and another computer. So they are 5 people and 2 computers and no Blake in Blake's 7. The only constant things are the ship, which is destroyed at the end of the third season, Avon and Vila. Oh, and sexy Servalan, the evil female villain. With a ship that can go anywhere in the galaxy, they always stumble in the same people! The ending was hilarious also, but you have to click here to see what I mean, I would hate to spoil it for you:
Here is a sample of the show:
And here is a video from an interview with the actors interpreting Blake and Servalan, old now and talking fondly of the series:
But there are also good news, Blake's 7 could be revived! I found an April 2008 link that says Sky One has commissioned two hour-long pilots for a new Blake's 7 series! Here is also a BBC News entry.
Update: Blake's 7 will be back! I doubt it will pack the same punch, unless done right. BBC should have remade it, but it seems that it will be a SyFy show, which may not be a good idea. The news confirming the comeback can be found here: Blake's 7: Classic BBC sci-fi to return on Syfy channel
There are a lot of movies about aliens, creatures from another world, coming here for whatever reason and trying to communicate. They usually are well versed in English, but sometimes they use some other language like the Klingons or they snarl and rip you to pieces or, sometimes, have to find a protocol of communication first, by using mathematics, gestures or music (like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Yet none of those creatures astound me more than some of the people on Earth doing things I could never ever imagine doing and using it to communicate.
One of these people is Michael Moschen, who uses juggling as language of sorts in order to comunicate his perception of time, space and movement. You can watch a small demo he gave at TED and have your own say:
You can see that he uses separate elements to create, to build, larger ansembles. He uses juggling moves like a language, with structure and building blocks and architecture. Now, what would we do if aliens would want to talk to us by moving objects around and making sounds with their limbs? Would be build a computer that can be programmed by juggling? Would we immediately fly in Michael Moschen as the Earth ambassador? Or is it too science fiction to imagine alien creatures communicating in the same way some people do?
Infected is a typical American sci-fi book, including small town mentality, a sports and US centric view, lots of government agencies, all working for the good of the citizens, keeping them all safe and ignorant and the warped morality that tells people they should destroy before they understand, just because they fear it.
That is something to be expected from an American author, though, and the book itself is not bad. It felt like it was inspired a lot by Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, which featured a similar personal dillema of alien infestation while the gov'ment was on the chase, but that one had more oompf. Of course, you can't compare aspiring Sigler to King, but then again, King's writing was never so great to me to begin with.
What I found really astounding is that a civilisation that uses biological machines to create a beach head on another planet would be so easily thwarted by a college athlete, a trigger happy black ops CIA agent and about a doctor and a half. Oh, and some Apache helicopters. What bothered me to no end is that I also felt this was a plausible scenario. I hope I am just stupidly influenced by similar literature, but would it really help to destroy the enemy before you get to at least understand it? What about the technology that was so easily recognisable as foreign and above Earth's current scientific level?
As a conclusion to both book and my own feelings: it was a nice read; not spectacular, but good enough to keep reading till the end. It is also available in podcast format and I myself have read it from a text file saved from a PDF that was gracefully provided free of charge by mr Sigler on the Escapepod podcast site.
Coma is one of my favourite bands if not THE favourite. They are Romanians, I know them, they're cool guys. Recently they organised an unpluggish concert called Coma Light. This is one of the songs there, although I do encourage you to look at them all (YouTube links gracefully provided by Imig/Smallex under the video). Great job, guys! Most of the songs you played deserve an album of their own. Here is the video for Culori, high quality from MetalHead TV. from YouTube.
This is a little YouTube video that shows a photoshoot of Angelina Jolie's when she was a teen. As you will see, she is a lovely looking girl, but that is not the reason I am posting this in my blog. The reason is the feeling that I am having watching this: dread. Here is a 16 years old girl, faking all the emotions in all the pictures that are made of her, with an ice cool professionalism, chewing gum when the film is being changed in the camera. You can imagine what kind of pictures will result from this shoot, when all of this is probably filmed in a small humid room with people watching TV at its more stupidest. Can you imagine trying to concentrate with that noise around? If you ever thought Angelina got to where she is because of her looks only, think again. This little human robot has good programming.
Angelina Jolie - Bikini modeling from 1992 (Photoshoot)
No, you are not mistaken, the voice for this band is Juliette Lewis herself, a pretty known actress that usually interprets beautifully screwed up characters. No wonder her music is similar :) But when I first heard of the band I didn't even bother to listen to them. Not another acting celebrity trying to sing! But when I found out the vocal on Prodigy's Spitfire and Hot Ride songs was Juliette Lewis, I changed my mind. And I am glad I did. Here is the weird and nicely sung Hot Kiss.
Don't go all "Oh no, not another Beowulf remake!" on me. This is a book that was written in 1971 by John Gardner, presenting the story of Beowulf through the eyes of Grendel. But it is not really the same story, just uses it as a scaffold for the philosophical ideas that he wanted to expose.
Structured into 12 chapters - each for a year in Grendel's life, each for a description of a philosophical current, each for an astrological sign - the book is not an easy one to understand, albeit pretty short. The language is modern and the wording is clear, but the underlying ideas need time and brain power to process, so don't read it in short bursts when you feel bored. Give it what it needs.
In the book, Grendel is not an animal monster, a thing with no thinking, quite the opposite. He is intelligent, articulate, philosophical, all these qualities being given to him at birth, not as a merit to anyone. He is hopelessly depressed and malevolent. He sees life and existence as meaningless, all the Universe a hollow illusion, a thing set to hurt him, set him apart, mock him. It is really easy to identify with him and to feel his feelings, while in the same time despise what he does and why he does it. Grendel is the part of us which we hate and which hates itself.
Enough, though, the book has bad parts as well. The occasional poem lyrics are meaningless in this book. The ending is confused and confusing. I would have liked a clearer ending, that's for sure. And also, it is hard to understand the book without at least knowing the Beowulf story and researching a bit from the Wikipedia article to find out what are the philosophical references hidden in each chapter. But then again, it was never a simple book, and the research (even if I haven't found time to do it) is worth it.
There was an animation film made in Australia in 1981 and featuring Peter Ustinov called Grendel Grendel Grendel which was based on the book, although I haven't been able to get my hands on it. It was partly musical as well, as expected in such a period, ugh!
If you are interested in finding out more about the meanings in the book and discussing about it, here is a link: The Grendel Board.
A while ago there was this site called Pandora (similar to lastFM, but better) that tried to match songs based on their internal structure not user preference. By choosing which songs you liked or you didn't like it would guess your preferences and try to play only songs you would listen to.
Apparently Winamp has a little known (or blogged) addin that does this. It is called the Nullsoft Playlist Generator and comes bundled with WinAmp. This is how you use it:
Open Winamp and go to Media Library
Create a playlist (or more) and add all your songs there
Right click on the playlist and select Send To: Add to Local Media
Go to Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, Media Library and click on Nullsoft Playlist Generator
Click on Configure selected plug-in, select your options and click Scan. I recommend the background scanning option.
After the scan is complete (or during it) you can right click on any song and select "Play similar song to..." and you will listen to songs that this software thinks are similar
That's it. The analysis is pretty superficial, but still better than nothing. It is perfect when you have gigs of songs and you don't want to browse forever, selecting which one you want or you don't want.
I am obsessed by this song, I am just listening to it again and again, typing at hyperspeed while I am doing it (I wish I would type meaningful things, too :) ). The video itself is from Smack My Bitch Up, but YouTube again blocked a cool clip so I had to take another from some other place. I couldn't find the original video for the song. (One that wasn't a fan made anime clip :-|)
Update: even worse, all video platforms other than Youtube have been sued out of existence and even on YouTube the only versions of this song you find are live concerts. It's amazing: a beloved video of a famous song just vanished off the Internet... If you find it somewhere, please let me know. Meanwhile, this is a remix version...
Usage: Pump up the volume and get in front of a keyboard on monday morning. :)
Long time since I posted a song on the blog. This is one old, but good song AND video. Rarely you find a truly good combination of sound and presentation nowadays. Quoting from the Wikipedia article for this song: Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke wrote the song about a narcissistic friend of his, which on closer inspection is showcased by the imagery in the lyrics - a parallel to earlier My Iron Lung EP track "Lewis [Mistreated]". He also says that it was somewhat of a competition between him and Jonny Greenwood to see who could fit the most chords into a song. "Just" is especially notable for Greenwood's guitar solo, which showcases some of his first uses of the Digitech Whammy Pedal. The guitar work in the song has been seen as an homage to post-punk band Magazine, one of Radiohead's key influences at the time.
The video reminds me of an old sci-fi story I've read about a word that, when heard by a person, would transform them into a purple jelly cone, including the one saying it. When someone finally understood and accepted the reality of it, it all turned into a race to stop a deaf person going to a radio station and speaking the word. He was immune, you see. Anyway, enjoy.
Well, imagine a lonely boy, without a family, learning magic in a special school and who's archenemy is a powerful yet evil wizard. He is always accompanied by his friends, a boy and a girl. The evil wizard likes snakes and manages to kill the headmaster of the magic school. No, it's not Harry Potter, it's Naruto!
It's like the Japanese liked Harry Potter, but thought they can do one better. They're not exactly magicians, but ninjas; Naruto Uzumaki, the main character, is a mix of both Harry and Ron, while boy number two, Sasuke Uchiha, is more like a small Snape. With a bit of a stretch, one could take the Naruto story and rip it off in a prequel to Harry Potter, with the parents as the characters :)
Anyway, long story short: the anime is children oriented, with all kind of soapy feelings, camaraderie and friendships, no gore, little blood, a bit of death, but "censored" where violence or tension is concerned. If you ignore the ridiculous simplicity of the characters, the story is pretty captivating and the "ninja science" fun. It more than makes up in quantity what it misses in quality. The first anime, Naruto, is concerned with the childhood of the characters and spans 220 episodes, while the ongoing Naruto: Shippūden with the adolescence and it is close to 50 episodes so far. There are 20 minutes episodes, if you count the 1.5 minutes presentation in, but don't worry, the fights last well into fourth episodes >:). Also, there are currently 4 Naruto movies: 3 for the first series and 1 for Shippūden.
Basically, if you cross Inuyasha with Harry Potter you get Naruto. I guess that any media industry, once it reaches a level of maturity, makes compromises in order to satisfy the greater audience. What Hollywood did for the US, the anime companies are doing for Japan, but in the end, the result is the same: dumbed down versions of what it could be.
Fortunately, animes are often based on manga publications and you can read Naruto well over the story arch in the anime, freely online.
In my own quest to find interesting books that would help me understand my place as a software developer I've stumbled upon Dreaming in Code, something I knew nothing about other than it featured the word "code" in the title. It had to be good!
In the end the book surpassed my expectations by describing software from a totally different point of view than the programming books I am used to. Dreaming in Code is not a technical book. It can be read by software developers and bored housewives alike. It features a kind and professional tone and the three years of documenting the book can only help put the whole story in perspective.
The storyline is simple: a software visionary decides to start a new project, one that would be open source, innovative and revolutionary and also a replacement for slumbering Outlook and Exchange type of software. Scott Rosenberg documents the development process, trying to figure out the answer to the decades long question: why is software hard? What starts very ambitious, with no financial or time contraints, ends up taking more than three years to get to a reasonable 0.6 release, time when the book ends. The project is still ongoing. They make a lot of mistakes and change their design a lot, but they keep at it, trying to learn from errors and adapt to a constantly changing world.
For me that is both a source of inspiration and concern. If Americans with a long history of software spend millions of dollars and years to create a software that might just as well not work, what chance do I stand trying to figure out the same questions? On the other hand the spirit of the team is inspirational, they look like a bunch of heroes battling the boring and pointless world of software development I am used to. And of course, there is the little smugness "Hey, I would have done this better. Give a million dollars to a Romanian and he will build you anything within a month". The problem, of course, is when you try to hire two Romanians! :)
Anyway, I loved this book. It ended before it had any chance of getting boring, it detailed the quest of the developers while in the same time putting everything in the context of great software thinkers and innovators and explaining the origin and motivation behind the most common and taken for granted technologies and IT ideas. It is a must read for devs, IT managers and even people that try to understand programmers, like their wives.
Exultant, the second book in the Destiny's Children series felt a lot better than Coalescent. Not without its own flaws, it made the entire experience better, but maybe that's just me.
