Legends of the Sun Pig

We watched Edge of Tomorrow on Sunday, and it was good.

Strong performances from Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise in the leads, and the balance of action and humour was just right. The situation lends itself to Groundhog Day comic moments, but they aren’t overplayed. I liked that the film didn’t spend a lot of time on exposition. It assumes that you will understand what’s going on, and that you can keep up with the time loops. The ending is flawed, but not bad. They couldn’t quite figure out how to shut it down cleanly…so they just didn’t.

(Disclosure: we received a promotional copy of Lock In from Tor Books)

I was very reluctant to read this. I like Scalzi’s books in general, but the core idea of Lock In, that a worldwide epidemic has left a proportion of the population in a locked-in state, pushes phobia buttons for me. It’s something I think about regularly, and not in my happier moments. It’s on my mind whenever I look at my music collection in iTunes, and see how many long my 4+5-star rated playlist is (currently 2134 songs, 6 days 9 hours play time). I crave new music, and I think about how long I could handle listening to the same collection over and over again. Would that collection be enough of a seed for a serviec like Last.fm or Spotify to build me an ongoing stream of new things I would like?

It’s a phobia. It doesn’t have to be rational.

Anyway, after figuring out that the book is more of a science fiction police procedural (one of my favourite genre blends) than about locked-in syndrome as such, I finally made a start on it. And because it’s Scalzi, it’s a very easy start. Engaging characters, fast-moving plot right from the start, believable setting, and a breezy writing style make the pages fly by. The mystery genuinely depends on the science fictional ideas, rather than merely resting on them as a backdrop. The only quibble I had was that the ending felt too familiar. Not the revelation of whodunnit as such, but its execution. Scalzi has a penchant for writing climactic scenes that involve smart characters all sitting together and exchanging smart dialogue to explain the super-smart resolution they’ve figured out, and Lock In has one just like that. I suppose that’s like complaining about a pizza for being covered in cheese, though. Lock In is packed with great ideas, but it didn’t leave me feeling thrilled.

(Bear in mind that because of my initial reaction, I was probably applying a certain amount of emotional distance to the book throughout, so your experience may be very different.)

I ordered The Magicians’ Land by Lev Grossman and Echopraxia by Peter Watts from Transreal last week, and they arrived yesterday. Echopraxia takes place in the same universe as Blindsight, one of the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. I’m feeling somewhat scared in advance of starting Echopraxia, but in a good way.

Also been playing a lot of Elite: Dangerous lately, and it’s still good. Because Elite involves a certain amount of nostalgia for me, I did a search the other day for “The Micro User”, a the BBC Model B magazine I used to eagerly await, and copy-type code listings from. (Saving to cassette tape!) Found an archive of scans at http://8bs.com/tmucovers.htm. 1984. Those issues. Wow.

Mallory Ortberg – Normal Stages In Child Development:

6 months-1 year

• All clocks stop when child enters a room
• Speaks backwards
• Moon allergy
• Heart often vanishes
• Hair takes on shape of Witch’s Ladder
• Can’t touch iron
• Everything hurts
• Demonstrates independence by starting quarrels with the Cunning Folk
• Appearance of Vengeance Limbs

(It’s like she knows us.)

Pete Warden – “Why nerd culture must die”:

I’d always hoped we were more virtuous than the mainstream, but it turns out we just didn’t have enough power to cause much harm. Our ingrained sense of victimization has become a perverse justification for bullying. That’s why I’m calling time on nerd culture. It’s done wonderful things, but these days it’s like a crawling horror of a legacy codebase so riddled with problems the only rational decision is to deprecate it and build something better.

(Via Alexis Madrigal’s 5 Intriguing Things)

Must try this recipe: Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats – The Food Lab: Use the Oven to Make the Best Darned Italian American Red Sauce You've Ever Tasted

This is red sauce. The slow-cooked, rib-sticking Italian-American stew designed to fill you up with equal parts flavor and pride. It’s the kind of sauce for which you open up the windows while you’re cooking just to make sure that everyone else in the neighborhood knows what you’re up to. It’s the kind of sauce kids defend the honor of in grade school.* It’s the kind of sauce you want your meatballs swimming in, your chicken parm bathed in, and the sauce that you want not just tossed with your spaghetti, but spooned on top in quantities that’d make a true Italian cry out in distress.

A few weeks ago Kottke pointed to some people rediscovering the fun of just blogging.

Lockhart Steele:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stupid fun linking to each other’s blog posts for no other reason than that they existed and that it amused us greatly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

[…] But this is not primarily a promotional undertaking, because that would suck. I’ll also blog about restaurants, travel, the South Street Seaport, the great city of Charleston, the great state of Maine, ephemera, nonsense, whatever. My hope is to relearn the practice of daily blogging, which used to be the most effortless thing in the world for me but now feels terrifying.

Elizabeth Spiers:

When I was a kid, seven or eight years old or thereabouts, I used to make copious lists of things I liked and didn’t like. I don’t remember why. I think some of it was about asserting identity and defining myself by those likes and dislikes. I remembered it a few months ago when I was skimming Susan Sontag’s notebooks and found an entry from February of 1977 where she did exactly the same thing as an adult. A sample:

Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, Wagon-Lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, pen knives, aphorisms, hands.

Things I dislike: Television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.

Sontag would have been about 44 when she wrote that. (I too like the color blue and dislike baked beans, but I had to Google to find out what a traversin is, and I must confess: I am ambivalent.)

Since reading that, I’ve been mentally composing lists of things I like and dislike. I should write them down.

And (via) to Fred Wilson:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

When I started blogging here at AVC, I would write about everything and anything. Then, slowly but surely, it became all about tech and startups and VC. It is still pretty much that way, but I feel like I’m heading back a bit to the personal blog where I can talk about anything that I care about.