Legends of the Sun Pig

What I’ll be reading over the Christmas break:

And the other books in the trilogy, The Way into Magic, and The Way Into Darkness. Epic fantasy isn’t normally my bag of cheese, but I loved Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces books, and I’m excited to see where he goes with these.

I’m equally interested in the novel A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark which he included for Kickstarter backers:

A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark is not your standard urban fantasy. Instead of a twenty-something ass-kicker, the protagonist is a party-loving socialite in her mid-sixties. It’s also a thriller with a pacifist hero, set in a contemporary fantasy world in which the most dangerous enemy you can have is a smart, resourceful human being.

Reviewish things will follow.

Foxglove Summer: No, Ben Aaronovitch, no! That’s not how to end a book. After a relaxed, methodical build-up over the course of the story (befitting the rural setting of this episode), the five-page finale was a “wait, what?” moment. Surely there’s another chapter, the publisher just forgot to include it? (I seem to remember that Broken Homes ended with a similarly short wrap-up, and that I wasn’t particularly satisfied with it, either.) Also, the way DI Nightingale was only reachable by telephone throughout the book made me think that the actor who plays him was tied up on another project, and unavailable for filming. Overall: I used to enjoy this series, but I keep being annoyed by the endings.

Recently watched films:

• The Maze Runner: Thrilling YA adventure, so long as you’re willing to suspend disbelief for long enough. Specifically: that a group of amnesiac teen boys on a desert island (or whatever) would form that kind of stable, functional, even idyllic society. (See also: ) Also, one of the key points of a story like this is finding our why they’re in the maze, and what it’s for. You have to suspend your disbelief over that, too.
• The Wolf of Wall Street: Watched this with Mum & Dad, and Fiona. I’d expected it to be more Wall Street and less Scarface. It’s not. Some great performances, and some wonderful physical comedy, but it goes on for far too long.
• Jack Reacher: Decent vigilante action film, so long as you don’t think too carefully about the ludicrousness of its premise. Having watched three Tom Cruise movies this year (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and this one), he still reliably delivers that hero persona.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 1:
• Lucy: Just…no. That Morgan Freeman’s professor character’s crackpot evidence-free theories would be getting knowing laughs and nods from an apparently respectable audience in a huge auditorium; no. That he would be living it large in a fancy hotel in the middle of Paris, room service all the way; no. That the criminals would go from apparently not knowing what is in the suitcase to having full-blown plans in place for transporting it, to staging an impromptu all-out war in a city on the other side of the world; no. That Lucy would go from party-hard student to a monotone, emotionless, transhuman sociopath with no steps in between; no. The only evidence of a sympathetic human relationship in the film comes in a single shot where police captain Del Rio (hiding behind cover) briefly asks one of his shot and wounded officers how he is doing, and the officer gives him a so-so hand wave. That’s all. The gun-play action scenes are mediocre; the car chases full of less-than-seamless CGI. Just…no.

Netflix in the Netherlands doesn’t have Continuum season 2 yet, so I’ve been watching it on my trips to Edinburgh. It’s better than the first season, with the interweaving storylines evolving nicely.

Listening to a lot of: Seeds by TV on the Radio (touring in February – might try in and catch them); Sonic Highways by the Foo Fighters; and La Roux (concert in Paradiso last Wednesday; gig report to follow).

Still playing a lot of Elite.

Ooooooh:

Breaking my “no tech posts” habit, Jimmy Breck-McKye has a notable article about on the state of JavaScript in 2015:

Innovation is great, but this kind of churn rate seems excessive. It’s just not possible for developers to make large, upfront investments of time in getting to grips with new frameworks and technologies when there’s no guarantee of their longevity. Programmers want to program – they want to build things, and be masters of their craft. But how can we get anything done when we’re spending most of our time learning? How can we feel like craftsmen when we’re scrabbling in the dark with unfamilar tech?

[…]

• The churn rate of front end JavaScript technologies is problematic
• People are starting to feel burned out and alienated by the pace of change
• The answer might be to eschew monolithic frameworks in favour of microlibraries

I was feeling burned out by this explosion of technologies last year. I don’t think the landscape has got any better since then; in fact, the Angular 2.0 roadmap has probably forced more people to confront the situation.

A few months ago I booked a ticket for the New Pornographers at Melkweg this evening, but I’m not going to go. I don’t like wasting an opportunity to see a band I like, but:

• I’m tired and not feeling great. In fact, the whole household is under the weather. Alex is worst off, but we’re all having a pyjama day.
• I don’t particularly like their new album.
• Dan Bejar is on the European leg of the tour, but Neko Case isn’t.
• The last time I saw them live was pretty mediocre.
• It’s cold, dark, and really wet.

I always find live music uplifting and invigorating, so that is an argument in favour of going out. Staying in and moping around instead of going out and indulging my passions is a depression warnings sign…but I’m not feeling depressed, and I’m not just avoiding doing things I enjoy. Yesterday evening we had a home cinema double bill of The Terminator and Shaun of the Dead, and I quite fancy watching Terminator 2 as a follow-up this evening. Either that or getting started on Assassin’s Creed: Unity or settling in for an evening of space trucking in Elite.

It’s not just a matter of staying home and conserving spoons: there are a bunch of other fun, positive things that I actively want to be doing more this evening.

I love Parliament/Funkadelic and Janelle Monáe, and the science-fictional elements of their music. I’d been aware of the term Afrofuturism, but I hadn’t thought about it much until reading Inda Lauryn’s article “Wave My Freak Flag High: Afrofuturism, Imagination, and Impostor Syndrome” in The Toast last week:

Parliament/Funkadelic－their brand of extraterrestrial play did more than embrace blackness. George Clinton took the freakery associated with blackness and transformed it into an intergalactic carnival with the funkiest of soundtracks. In one song with two words, Parliament/Funkadelic embodies the very essence of how I see afrofuturism: the past informs the future. Or, as the old adage says, you have to know where you been to get to where you’re going. This is what Mothership Connection means. Clinton also brings me back to the question of how afrofuturism gives a means to create the self and transcend the limitations and common myths about the black body. However, this embracing the alien has its own tinge of freakery. I’m not sure if it is better to be one type of freak (alien) than another (cyborg), but I wonder what it is about this transcendence that makes that body “acceptable” or at least acceptable in the arena of the stage. It comes back to the contradiction of the hypervisible but invisible black body: everyone loves blackness/black culture, but not when it comes with the black body. To say that afrofuturism takes away or makes blackness less visible ignores the intersection of race and how that still affects the way afrofuturists are seen. After all, the press constantly referred to Erykah Badu as a flake for her presentation of blackness that did not fit into the acceptable performance of blackness for mainstream consumption. We accept this other freakery onstage, but do not transfer that acceptance to everyday black bodies on display in other contexts.

[…]

As someone who spends a lot of time in online communities that embrace animation, anime, scifi, the speculative and the paranormal, that imagination I tried so hard to suppress as a child has come back with a vengeance these days and works to inform a good part of my existence. It dares me to see myself as a writer, one who can make an impact, whether I make up stories about family or go ahead with the space opera that’s been in the works in the front of my mind for the past couple of years. Embracing this sense of imagination means I can see a world better than the one in which I currently live, as well as the ways in which I can work to achieve that world. This is what afrofuturism does. Even in a dystopian context, a creator has imagined how the ills that currently affect us will eventually be our undoing, so dystopia effectively works to help us find out what we are doing wrong and how we should go about fixing it before it’s too late.