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Future Compliant, June 22: Enki, Androids, and Enhanced Reality

Ricko — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 10:57:32 -0500

I first came across the idea in William Gibson's novel Virtual Light, and he plays with the idea some in his new novel, Spook Country. But for my money, the coolest sci-fi interpretation is in Vernor Vinge's award winning novel, Rainbows End, which I loved through and through and recommend to one and all. Let's call it enhanced reality - the concept of layering "virtual" images and facts over the real world as you look around it. So, for example, say you're wearing some special goggles or contacts or what have you, and they're connected to the internet and downloading information in real time about the world around you. When you look at something, you not only see the real thing, but you see information and even other images superimposed on top of reality, or in Vinge's book, an entire alternate version of whatever you're looking at. What you see would be entirely context sensitive, tied into GPS location and map databases and maybe even info beacons attached to RFID chips or other devices in the objects themselves. In a store the items' prices and details would sow up. Wandering around the streets, you could have street numbers, addresses, and even a directional arrow overlaid to help you find your way. I always thought this enhanced reality concept was a really cool idea, and of course I'm not the only one who felt that way. Naturally enough, someone's working hard on making it come true.

These two researchers are developing a project called Enkin and it aims to do just that, and they're going to do it on your phone. Go ahead and watch the video on their site. It's only about five minutes long and while it is in early prototype and therefore a little rough around the edges, it is in fact super, crazy, cool, and awesome. They were participating in Google's Android app development competition, although for reasons passing all understanding they weren't chosen as one of the 50 winners. But never fear, they say Google has contacted them directly and there's no way they're going to pass up on this kind of technology for their mobile phone platform. Android, by the way, is Google's cross-platform, open source cell phone development platform that's supposed to launch later this year. I'm in love with the idea of Android and am psyched that my carrier, T-Mobile, is on board with it. As cool as the IPhone is, the fact that it's so locked-down and controlled by Apple makes me go crazy. Not that my Blackberry's much better mind you, but still, it drives me nuts. So I'm really looking forward to this open source alternative.

I have to say that, looking at this list of the 50 that did win (on this post there's a link to download a pdf) none of them strike me as nearly as super cool as the Enki project. On the other hand, all of them do seem much simpler to implement and more likely to be ready to ship when Android is first released. There are some cool ones in the mix, including lots of nice, location-based apps that accomplish some of the same things that the sci-fi version of enhanced reality I talked about early promise. There are a couple of apps designed for use with location based reality gaming, which sounds very fun to me, and others, like some sort of Golf thing, which might be really great if I played golf. What's great is that because these are open source and will be available on multiple phones from multiple carriers they're going to see a lot more uptake then the walled-in, Steve Jobs-controlled apps that make their way onto the IPhone. At the same time, if any of them prove really useful or popular, Apple will be forced to adopt them as well, spreading the open source love even farther.

I really do think portable phone-sized computing is the future of computing in general. I already do as much work on my tiny EeePC as I do on my other computers, and as things get smaller and more powerful and wireless broadband starts to become actually ubiquitous, things are going to get even more portable and I'm going to love every minute of it. More and more, I think the big, heavy desktops are going to be the sole domain of people who need serious computing power like video editors, artists, programmers, and so on. For 99% of home users, it's all going to get smaller, and easier, and more portable, and very much cheaper. I look forward to the day when my glasses or contacts overlay a virtual screen on the table in front of me and I fold out the keyboard from the side of my mobile device to do my touch typing on. That's probably a few years off, but I do have a message for Google - bring my Enki for my Android phone, and bring it soon!

Media Glutton: Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

Ricko — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:59:30 -0500

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons off and on for a really long time. If my math and memory are right, I started iin third grade which makes it somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 years. Oh, man, I hadn't done that math before. That's a really long freaking time. I played D&D and other role-playing games all through my school years, although less and less in college. But then more and more in grad school. And then, through some freak combination of luck, desire, and hard work, I started writing books for role-playing games in the mid 1990's and even almost got a job at Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes D&D these days. But I wrote my last pen and paper RPG product in 2000, and ever since then I've been just a fan and a player of tabletop games. It's become a really nice, cheap, fun release to get together with my gaming group of mostly married 30-somethings and play games on Sunday nights, although we'd mostly been playing other things besides actual D&D for the last year or more.

Then, a couple weeks ago, after months of anticipation, the long-awaited Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition came out. I'd been following ruors and leaks and hints about the new overhaul for six months, and I was excited to see what they designers had changed and what had stayed the same. Indeed, the last time I'd been this excited about playing D&D was back in 2000 when they released 3rd Edition. They'd hinted at big changes, and quite frankly that was something that really drew my interest. I have no particular attachment to any of the grand old traditions of D&D, although I can be as nostalgic about my youthful playing days as the next gamer. But it was't like I was playing 3rd Edition anymore (or 3.5 for that matter). Bring on the newness, I thought.

And new and different 4th Edition D&D is. It's a complete overhaul from the ground up, with only the most basic elements of the game the same as they once were. You still play fantasy heroes from various mythical races. There are Clerics and Wizards and Paladins and Rogues (the names "thieves' and 'magic-users' having disappeared in 3rd Edition). Your ability scores are still the classic six and you of course roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit your enemy in battle. But beyond that, even where some of the names have remained the same the game, and especially the way you actually play it from moment to moment, has changed a lot.

My biggest worry when I first heard about some of the changes they were planning was that the game would be more like a World of Warcraft-style online game than a traditional tabletop game. As turns out, the worries were well-founded, because that's pretty much exactly what happened. As it turns out though, that's not nearly as bad a thing as I was worried it would be. It makes sense, actually. MMORPG's like World of Warcraft have been borrowing heavily, almost entirely even, from pen and paper RPG's like D&D since their inception. It would be surprising if they didn't make some improvements of their own along the way that the tabletop games could turn around and steal back.

The most obvious changes come in the area of balance and focus. Online games have to do their best to make each class of character balanced, which is an area the tabletop games have never really excelled at. The new D&D breaks down each class and really focuses hard on exactly what role that class plays in combat and then makes sure each class has some specific role to fill and offers the player plenty of options during play. From a role-plying purist's point of view, this seems to suck out some of the imagination and flexibility of the traditional gaming experience, and I think it probably does do that to a small degree. But the trade-off (and risk) is, in my judgment, well worth the trade, because D&D 4th Edition is now more fun to actually play, especially moment to moment and encounter to encounter.

Players have fewer options about what kinds of powers their characters get, especially the spell casters like wizards and clerics (although the fighters and rogues probably have more options). As many have said before me, the trade off is that, whle characters have fewer desigs options, they have a whole lot more optios during actual combat. This makes every round for the players a new set of tactical decisions and choices. That makes for a fun game.

The one thing I'm theoretically opposed to even though in practice I don't mind at all, is that to really enjoy the game you pretty much have to play it with miniatures and a grid board. The whole game system assumes this setup, which is not the way I like to play role-playing games besides D&D. For me the new game has become less about the role-playing and much ore about the series of tactical combat situations you find yourself in. Here too the game is a lot more like a modern dy MMORPG than anything else. The story is there, the characters are there, but the meat of the experience is in the combat.

The only question I don't really feel qualified to answer about the new D&D is whether or not it's a good jumping on place for new players. My gut instinct tells me that it probably is. The system makes sense, and is well laid out and, if not easy to understand, then at least not incredibly complicated. The thought processes behind it and general structure of character advancement will make a lot of sense to those used to playing RPGs on computers or consoles. Add in the inherent pleasures of playing around a table with real, live friends and the added flexibility and fun that comes with a human DM who can take into account and easily gloss over the weird rule bits and improvise in unexpected ways, and it's a great, unique kind of fun. So why not give it a try? I know I'll be playing this Sunday.

Media Glutton, June 13, 2008: HULK SMASH!!!

Ricko — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:29:45 -0500

Media Glutton, June 13, 2008: HULK SMASH!

Just got back from seeing the early show of the new Hulk movie. I really do like the AMC $5 morning movie rate on weekends - it makes seeing films so affordable that I don't mind risking some cash. I wasn't very excited about the new Hulk, and as far as I can tell that seems to be the general attitude from most people I talk to. I seem to remember enjoying Ang Lee's Hulk film when I first saw it, but being annoyed by it in retrospect. I think I was so dazzled by the cool moving split screen storytelling at the beginning of that other movie that I ignored a lot of its faults. Although the fact that I never saw it again says something about how lacking I found it. This is a better Hulk movie than that one, chiefly because it dives right in with a very abbreviated origin-story flashback during the first couple minutes and then plops you into watching on-the-run Bruce Banner living the slum life in Brazil. The first act of the movie takes place there, and it was definitely the strongest part of the film. I really liked that whole half hour or so, from the exotic locales to Edward Norton's strong, engaging performance. I was smiling a lot during this section, from the top right on through the first big Hulk-sized action sequence.

As the story moves into its second act, it remains strong for the most part, and it kept me going. It's clear that the script writers are borrowing a lot from the Bruce Jones-written arc on the Incredible Hulk comic book from several years ago, and that's a very good thing. They capture the quiet, worried desperation of Bruce Banner on the run from the government without ever sinking too deep into despair and depression. There aren't the kinds of laughs that there were in Iron Man, but there are some funny nods to the old TV series, including a great cameo by Lou Ferrigno which everyone in the audience who noticed it also enjoyed. The second big Hulk action scene is really solid too, with some cool Hulk vs. Army action sequences and a nice taste of what (in a weird way) we might someday see in a Captain America film in terms of super soldier action. I do have to point out though that the digitial Hulk effects are only ever OK, and sometimes they're just not good. I think the Ang Lee digital Hulk achieved greater heights of both effect and action than this movie ever does, but this film isn't saddled with either the muddled lows or any Hulk-indused poodles. The final action sequence, as shown over and over again in the previews, takes place between the digital Hulk and the equally digital and for some reason more loquacious Abomination. These CGI vs. CGI battles always leave me cold, and this one was no exception. There were enough little nifty bits and tricks I hadn't seen to carry me through with a basic level of interest, but I was never thrilled. It's just hard to care that much about these computer generated titans, and the human actors who get swept up in the conflict end up being distracting reminders of the contrast between real and invented images (not to mention kind of annoying).

Still, on balance I reccomend The Incredible Hulk. Check it out if you have any interest at all, and if you're a comic fan it's probably a must see. Here again, like Iron Man, we have Marvel Studios as the producers of the film, and I think they really benefit from taking the reins themselves. There are some nice crossovers to the world they started establishing in Iron Man, paying of most of all in the final scene of the movie where someone cool makes a guest appearance. No need to wait through the end of the credits this time - they wanted to make sure no one missed this, and it had those in the audience (even those like me who knew it was coming) excited and in some cases cheering. As someone behind me in the audience said after we'd waited through the whole credits just to be sure there wasn't anything else (there wasn't) - "I just want to sit right here until they make the next movie." I don't know if I'd go that far - I've got things to do between now and 2009 or 2010, but I'm pretty sure I'll b there opening weekend when the next Marvel Studios flick does come out, no question at all. Unless it's more of that crappy Fantastic Four series. Or Ghost Rider. Or maybe even Spider-man after that last horrible movie. OK, they've still got a little more work to do before they earn my complete trust, but they're on the right path, no doubt about it.

Future Compliant, June 11, 2008: Electoral College, Vaccines, and Linux

Ricko — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:47:58 -0500

The big future issue in the US these days is of course the very, very near future of the presidential elections in November. Now that we've got our candidates, one of who will make a great president and the other of whom is John McCain, the pundits, reporters, coffee shop wags, and everyone else is wondering if Obama can really win. Lots of people hope he does but have some niggling feeling that maybe he can't. They think that very backwards looking, non-future compliant factors like racism and xenophobia will make it impossible for him to win. Put another way they just don't think this country is ready to elect a black man as president. I disagree, although I'm sure those kinds of small-minded jerks are out there. But he doesn't need every single vote to win, and most of those types were never gonna vote for him anyway. The truth is, he doesn't even need most of the votes. All he needs is 270 electoral votes.

And that's where this really cool electoral vote counting interactive map comes in really handy (hat tip to Talking Points Memo). It allows you to play prognosticating pundit and do some looking into the future of your own. The map comes pre-set with the solid red and solid blue leaning states already marked out and the swing states yellow. You can click on them to change from yellow to red to blue and the map automatically adds up the electoral votes for you down at the bottom. Viewed this way, coupled with Obama's strong showing in soe swing states like Virginia and Colorado where Democrats haven't won in years, and the picture looks pretty grim for John McCain. If he loses any single one of the mid-sized states that Bush narrowly carried in 2004, then he's screwed. If Obama holds Kerry's states and wins some combination of Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia he wins. And there are lots of other ways for him to win too. So spend some quality time with this lovely map, and plug in your poll results as they come in. All I'm saying is, change is gonna come.

Since I'm on a roll here with the unavoidable mixture of technology and politics, lets move on to another much more scientific and yet (unfortunately) almost as politically charged topic: vaccines. There's been quite a movement afoot of late attributing all sorts of supposed horrors that come with vaccination. Jenn McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey have been spearheading a new Green Our Vaccines movement that is just a thinly veiled attempt to ban vaccines entirely based on a lack of understanding of how chemistry really works and what the real health issues are. With politicians like Robert F Kennedy Jr. stepping in on this one and many of the candidates, including McCain and, to a lesser but not make me happe level, Obama, giving lip service to this fabricated issue. This Time magazine online article does a good job of preventing the science and cutting though a lot of the BS.

Now here's something to make a writer of hacker-inspired fiction green with envy: Cory Doctorow's great new young adult novel, Little Brother, includes a number of scenes featuring his protagonists using a hyper-secure, privacy-centric version of Linux called Paranoid Linux. Well, lo and behold, someone has gone out and started a Paranoid Linux group devoted to making just such a distribution a reality. I really hope they follow through, as this is a great idea and just the kind of thing Linux is perfect for. If they're especially smart, they'll shoot for making it as user friendly as possible and try and bring these kinds of privacy tools into the hands of users who're hooked on something like Ubuntu or the EeePC Xandros distro - they're basing it on Debian it seems, so hopefully that'll be the case.

Did any of that talk about distributions make any sense to you at all? If it didn't, then maybe you need to work on your own future compliance and look into switching over to Linux. Go ahead and try it out, especially if you've got an older computer lying around or something. I'm at about 90% Linux for all my computing needs, although I'll admit, it sometimes takes some work arounds, mostly in the hardware department. My old printer is the one thing keeping me tied to a windows based machine, but I hardly ever print, so it's not that big a deal at all. But don't take my word for it. Someone else has kindly provided the world (including you!) with 25 Reasons to Convert to Linux. So, what're you waiting for? Check it out.

Media Glutton: Kung Fu Panda, Firefly Rain, and Obedience

Ricko — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:40:59 -0500

Media Glutton: Reviewing Obedience, Firefly Rain, and others

Double dipping of Media Glutton this week - part of the fallout of my massive dose of free bookage this past weekend. Plus I just saw Kung Fu Panda and wanted to get in a good word about that right away.

So let's start with Kung Fu Panda. I haven't really gotten on board the animated movie bandwagon. I know in theory that Pixar flicks are great, but I've only seen the Incredibles and one other one. I don't even remember which one, one of the early ones. Not Toy Story. For whatever reason, I just never feel like going. Now, Kung Fu Panda's a Dreamworks film, not Pixar, but it's the same kind of thing. Plus, it's really, really good. This is just about a perfect movie. It's not a great movie, and it doesn't break any new ground or transcend the genre, but it is certainly a great time and does everything it's trying to do with precision, grace, and style. It's the story of an overweight dreamer of a panda bear named Po (voiced with perfect verve by Jack Black) who dreams of being a kung fu warrior only to be recruited by seeming accident into just that fate. But of course there are no accidents, as the wise sage turtle who runs the kung fu temple keeps saying. I don't even need to go through the plot - it's mostly exactly what you might expect from the set up, but the brilliant parts come in all the details, from subtle and broad jokes to the little twists and turns that surprise just enough to keep things interesting. We were in an audience full of kids who loved the movie - and in the end when Po beats the bad guy (that's not really a spoiler is it?) he does it while saying a cute little Jack Blackism. And it was great. It was awesome! I wanted to repeat the little word outloud I was so swept up in it. The kids sitting behind me did just that, and I laughed and laughed. So if any part of you thinks catching this flick sounds like a good idea, listen to that part; it's totally right.

So let's on to books with Will Lavender's Obedience, which was recommended to me by one of those Suggested Summer Reading lists, maybe in the New York Times or possibly on Salon.com. I'm not going to link to it, because, quite frankly, I don't think it's to be trusted. Obedience jumped out at me from its description: a mysterious college professor at a small university manipulating his students into some strange and possibly dangerous mental game. It called up memories of one of my favorite books, Donna Tart's The Secret History. I went and bought it that very day, in hardback no less. That was, it turns out, a mistake. Obedience is not a bad book by any means, but I found it very unsatisfying. It treads in territory where others have gone before, which is fine and good, but it's tricky territory. We're talking the same kind of story that John Fowles handled excellently in The Magus and David Fincher was less convincing with in his film The Game. It's a mystery combined with a bunch of mind games that may or may not be spinning out of control. Everyone's playing an angle, and you don't know who to trust. Except it soon became pretty clear who to trust and who switched sides, and the final resolution was unpredictable only insofar as it was an even less plausible version of what I'd expected all along. I finished the book out of sheer orneriness and a compulsion to find out what happened, but I can't say I'm happy I did.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we have Rich Dansky's new horror novel, Firefly Rain. This is a Southern Gothic ghost story, working firmly in that tradition, although updating it for contemporary times. The fact is, unlike tales of college professors manipulating their students, I don't much go in for Southern Ghost tales, but I did some freelance writing work for Dansky a decade ago, and I liked his writing, so when I saw him at BEA promoting the book, I was excited to say hi and pick up a copy.

Firefly Rain sucked me right in. I started it Tuesday and finished last night, staying up until 2 am to finish it off. It is a classic ghost story, at least in the set up - a prodigal son returns to his ancestral Carolina home after his mother has passed on and his big-city career has fallen apart. Almost immediately things start to go weird, as his car gets stolen and his neighbors give him the stink-eye. This is a small, family ghost story, with just a few characters, all of them interesting, and some genuine yet subtle scary moments. It's been a while since I read a good ghost story, and Firefly Rain not only satisfied me, but whetted my appetite for some more at some point in the near future - hopefully Dansky's next book isn't too far away.

Media Glutton June 4, 2008: Book Expo America

Ricko — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:13:33 -0500

I've just returned from Los Angeles where I was doing a reading at the Write To The City event being held in unofficial conjunction with this year's Book Expo America. The event went amazing - a tone of people showed up and the venue was packed for all nine of the crime writers' readings, along with some really moving speeches by local housing activists. I think everything exceeded everyone's expectations for the slam, and I was lovin' life all night long.

The next morning I got up and went with a friend downtown to the LA convention center to check out the actual Book Expo. The expo is THE main event in the book world in the US, particularly for publishers, distributors, and book sellers, but for authors as well. It's a huge trade show where publishers big and small show off their wares, highlight upcoming titles, and feature various authors. It's the kind of place where thousands of deals get made and many, many more thousands of dollars gets spent. I'd been to the BEA in 2006 to promote my first edition of Geek Mafia, which I'd published under my old Blue King Studios imprint. It was, all things considered, a financial disaster for me. I spent a ton of money and made nary a useful contact nor did I even get any press out of it. I learned an important, vital lesson: if you're a small player in the book game, it's insane to try and take on the big companies on their home turf. 99% of the people who attend are there for the big name authors and the big ass publishers. While some might be open to something small and new if it's interesting enough, it's almost impossible to stand out in the obscenely crowded field or arouse much interest when you're competing for attention with most of the authors on the best seller list. So, as a micro or self publisher, I don't really see the point in attending an event like BEA. I saw one guy there doing exactly what I'd done two years ago - hawking one book with a kind of catchy title in his own little booth. My heart went out to him because I think I know what kind of disappointment awaits. But I picked up his book, and if it's good I'll let you know. If it's not, I won't - no sense kicking a guy when he's down.

When I say I picked up a copy, I mean he gave it to me. You don't sell books at BEA - not individual ones. You give copies away and hope that the person either orders a bunch for their store/library or writes you a nice review or...something, anything that results in sales. Of course most of the people you give the books away to won't help you in anyway, but there's no way to really no or discriminate easily, and so you give them to whoever asks. When I was there, I gave away 500 copies of Geek Mafia. Yes, 500. Ugh. This obviously sucks if you're not a big publisher with money to burn. However, it's totally awesome if you're just an avid reader looking to score a shit load of free books!

My friend Laurie and I went together, backpacks ready and empty. Here's a secret for you if BEA comes to your city - they don't check or care who pays to come in. While it's an "industry" event, they're not strict on that at all. I was ostensibly there at the pleasure of AK Press, my current distributor, but my name wasn't on any list. I just walked up, said I was with AK, gave them my name, gave Laurie's name as Chloe just for the fun of it, paid $40 for each pass, and in we went. Once inside there were plenty of heavy duty paper bags available to carry loot. And loot we did. Not every booth gives stuff away - the Taschen booth for example had a woman on guard against people swiping any of their beautiful and expensive photography books - but there are plenty who do. Plus there are scores of author signings every hour, where they give away the book AND let you shake hands with the author. The more famous writers, like Neil Gaiman for example, require tickets (which are free), but most just need you to show up and wait in line at the appointed hour. But there are plenty of free books on the main show floor too, and I hate lines, so the only one I waited in was to say hi to Cory Doctorow and pick up another copy of Little Brother (so now I can give my unsigned copy to a mischevious teen I think it will be perfect for). My only real regret was not coming back the next day to get the new John Hodgeman book and meet him, so I'll have to wait 'til September like everyone else.

But I got quite a haul - 32 books in all, with Laurie picking up another 21 and there being very little overlap between us. I'm particularly excited about the new fiction line that Wizards of the Coast has started, Discoveries. They had all five of those books there, and I got four of them signed. Right now I'm tearing through Rich Dansky's Firefly Rain, which is a lovely southern Gothic ghost story. Again, a fuller review once I finish. I had to ship a box of books home to Florida and I'm pretty sure I'm set for the next couple months. Definitely, definitely worth thr $40 entrance fee. The show's back in New York in May of 2009, so New Yorkers. don't miss a chance to con your way into a whole summer's worth of free reads. I'll be the big guy with the bulging backpack...

Media Glutton - Untraceable, Consider Phlebas, The World Ends With You

Ricko — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:03:33 -0500

I watched the Diane Lane thriller Untraceable over the weekend on DVD. I was wary of the film, as any movie centering around hacking and the internet is bound to get some really basic things wrong that will piss me off. But I was desperate for something mentally light yet thrilling, and this seemed to fit the bill. Lane plays an FBI Cyber Crimes agent working the night shift who comes up against a serial killer who's setting up elaborate tortures and broadcasting them online - the twist being that the feeds are live and the more people few the site the faster the vitim dies. OK, fine, kind of an interesting set up, even if the metaphor is something substantially less than subtle. And in the beginning the techno babble seems to make some sense, or at least mostly uses the right words to mean the right things. The ultimate justification for why they can't shut the site down doesn't, as far as I can tell, really make any sense. The excuse is that the site is hosted in Russia, but from my understanding of how Domain Name Servers and Ineternet Service Providers works, I'm pretty sure they could have blocked anyone from seeing the site. The movie comes up with an excuse as for why this doesn't work, and it was enough for me to role with it and kee watching.

The unravelling of the actual mystery is fun enough, and I enjoyed it. Lane is good, as are the other actors, even if the writing is pretty pedestrian (and occasionally silly). I think the film makers knew it too, as listening to the first half hour of the director's commentary he never once said anything about the story or what drew him to it. This is a purely by-the-numbers thriller. Worst of all, once the mystery is reseolved, there's still almost half an hour left, which ends up laying out pretty much exactly like you would think it would with no surprises at all. Sigh. Wait for cable.

Inspired by my enjoyment of Iain M. Banks' Player of Games, I picked up the first novel in his Culture series of sci-fi books, Consider Phlebas. It was written before Player of Games, and you can sort of tell. It's still a really well written book, and the setting is all there in all its coolness, but there's a lot of excess verbiage in there too and the lot is not nearly as tight as Player of Games. It's definitely a different kind of book though, more of a romping adventure tale that flings itself from exotic, dangerous location to exotic even more dangerous location without much but the charcters and their perdicaments linking them together. But still it's an enjoyable, fun book that's worth picking up if you enjoy the other ones. The nice thing about the Culture novels is that they're not a series per se - each book is totally individual and they can be read in any order, so I'd suggest Player of Games before reading Consider Phlebas.

I'm also traveling this week - out in Los Angeles for Book Expo America related activities - which meant a lot of time attached to my mp3 player and Nintendo DS for the duration of the two flights. I bought a new game for the occasion - The World Ends With You. It's a very well-reviewed action/rpg thing set in modern day Tokyo. It sounded cool, it sounded different, and it is. And I kind of hate it. Because here's the thing, it turns out that I just realy don't like many Japanese RPG's. They're verbose, overwrought, and paced like a snail. I like the game's aesthetic, but it just grates on my nerves with every passing screen of eposition I have to click my way through. I could go on, but the truth is, this week's Zero Punctuation summed it up better than I can, so you should just go watch that.

So I went back to my three standby, ever reliable DS games - Tetris, Geometry Wars, and Advanced Wars: Dual Strike. All great games. And while I play I listen to a fist full of podcasts to help further distract me from the stultifying confinement of whatever jet powered aluminum tube I happen to be crammed into at the moment. One of my favorites, which I've been stockpiling for these longer flights, is the interview series from Creative Screenwriting magazine. They do screenings of films and then have hour or so long Q and A sessions with screenwriters. Even when I haven't seen the movie, indeed even when I never plan on seeing the movie, I find these interviews almost always fascinating listening. It's always nice to hear how other writers think and work, and screen writers in particular are interesting because of they usually have to have a laser-like focus on story and plot that I really appreciate.

Future Compliant - Wii Fit

Ricko — Tue, 27 May 2008 11:35:48 -0500

Wii Fit!

I've seen the future of exercise and it looks a lot like a scale without any numbers on it.

OK, "the future of exercise" might be a bit hyperbolic - the Wii Fit is by no means the most perfect exercise aid ever invented, and there is plenty of room for improvement and expansion, but it is, I think, a significant step forward. It's something new, and fun, and most important of all, effective. I've had mine for about a week now and have enjoyed it a great deal. The work outs I get are effective and so varied that the time flows by with ease. Some are simple, others quite challenging, and the Wii Fit ramps up the difficulty at a smooth, sensible rate.

The big, heavy, exciting new component id the balance board, a white, durable plastic board a couple inches thick that looks just like a scale with no numbers on it. It connects tirelessly to your Wii and works in synch with the Wii Fit software that guides you through the various exercises. There balance board really only does two things - weighs you and senses where you're putting weight on it with each of your two feet. But that's enough to really create a whole variety of exercises most of which focus on maintaining your balance while doing something challenging. The board is very sensitive to exactly where your weight and thus your balance is and gives you instant feedback so you can adjust your position or timing to fit the exercises parameters.

Wii Fit offers four categories of exercise - yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance games. I've only ever done a little yoga, although I've done similar exercises in my various martial arts training routines, and I find the Wii positions a lot of fun. The constant balance feedback makes a huge difference in keeping the position correct, and has a meaningful impact on my ability to achieve and maintain the poses with good form. The Strength Training is more challenging, and includes things like squats, push ups, crunches, and lunges. Again, I was surprised at some of the inventive ways they use the balance board to guide these exercises. The aerobics feature jogging in place, which works by holding the normal Wii remote and the machine deduces your pace from how the remote shakes up and down. This actually works pretty well (note, you don't jog ON the Wii fit), but jogging in place isn't super compelling. There's also a kind of step aerobics that works well and is fun, but the real star is the hula hoop, which is surprisingly challenging and after a minute or two can really get the heart pumping some. The balance exercises are the most like games and the least like exercise, and include variations on skiing and some other odd little games that are enjoyable if not particularly sweat-inducing.

The key feature for all of these exercises is the feedback the game gives you. Much like having a personal trainer in the gym encourages you to do exercises the right way and exhorts you to greater efforts, so the interaction with the Wii graphics on your TV engages and drives you in a way that just working out alone or even with a video cannot. The active feedback, critiquing your stance and rating your performance focuses the mind and fend off that mot pernicious of fitness enemies - boredom.

The Wii Fit is not without its problems of course. First of all is its reliance on Body Mass Index (BMI) for judging your fitness. The BMI is an outdated and not particularly useful measurement scale, especially for people like me with broader, larger body types that don't conform to the human averages. Yes I'm a little overweight, but even when I shed some pounds and get down to what would be a more ideal weight for my body, the Wii will still think I'm fat. So the thing is, you have to do some research on your own and determine how well the BMI applies to you before you give it any credence. On the other hand, the scale is really handy, and seems quite accurate to me, so that feature alone adds a lot of value to the Wii Fit. It not only weighs you, but tracks your weight from day to day and gives you reminders about whatever fitness goals you've set for yourself. I've heard different philosophies about whether you should weigh yourself every day or at longer intervals, but I've always found that weighing myself every day helps focus me on my diet and exercise program more effectively than anything else, and apparently the Wii Fit agrees. It also encourages you to weigh yourself at the same time each day, pointing out that our weights fluctuate by a couple pounds throughout the day.

The one big feature I think is missing (as far as I can tell anyway), is the ability to program a set workout into the Wii Fit instead of having to chose each exercise individually. The selection process provides breaks, but sometimes, especially with the shorter exercises, I'd like to roll right into the next yoga posture or strength exercise without any delay. But that's a minor quibble. Overall, I'm super pleased with my Wii Fit, and excited to not only use it, but to see what other, even more exciting home exercise gear comes along in the future.

Media Glutton, May 22 2008 - Indiana Jones

Ricko — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:39:13 -0500

Media Glutton May 22nd, 2008

So I decided to wait until today to write up this week's gluttony because I wanted to write about the new Indiana Jones movie. I can say with some assurance that it was not, in any sense, worth the wait. The movie is aggressively mediocre in its execution, and from the first appearance of a digital ground hog in the opening shot, I started to have a bad feeling about the flick. Now let me say right now that this is not a terrible movie. It's even a mildly enjoyable movie. There are some fun action sequences, especially an early chase scene that takes place in a normally staid environment, and a later, protracted action sequence in the jungle that makes little sense (and suffers from one glaring continuity error) but is a lot of fun while you're watching it. But the dialog and acting are both pretty flat across the board, although it's really the plot that fails on the most levels. Strangely, the thing I was worried about most, Shia LaBeouf's character, is actually just fine. He strikes the right balance between rebellious and reasonable, adventuresome and supportive. His particular stereotype could easily have gone very wrong, but it never did.

I must say though, I'm not surprised it's mediocre. The other Indiana Jones films, with the important exception of the original, are also mediocre movies at best. I re-watched The Last Crusade this past week, and it's a deeply flawed film with some terrible supporting performances and more than its share of goofiness and illogic. I guess I would put this new film a little below that, but only a little.

OK, I'm not gonna give any real spoilers, but I'm going to talk in really general terms about the ending and so there might be something here people consider spoilerish (I would consider it so), so don't read the rest of this paragraph if you care. The last act of the film, when they finally get to The Place and deal with The Big Mystery, is a real let down. I mean, the sets are awesome and the effects are cool, and the resolution is pretty much what we've been expecting all along, but there's no reason for Indy and friends to be there. If they'd just given the bad guys the skull at the beginning of the movie along with some directions and then gone home, the ending would have been exactly the same. Nothing the heroes does - nothing at all - determines the final resolution of the film. Nothing. I mean, this is sort of true in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark as well, but there it worked much better. Here it would be bad on its own, but as a pale reflection of the original its even more trite and insignificant. Yeah, the effects are cool, but they're also so far out there that it takes you out of the more visceral realm where these movies work best. Actually I found that throughout the use of digital effects compared to the practical ones in the first film make this movie less compelling at almost every turn - especially the damned digital gophers or groundhogs or whatever they are.

Alright, that's it for the spoilers. I guess on balance I can't quite reccomend this movie (as if you hadn't guessed by now). I wasn't bored watching it, but all I did as soon as it was over was start complaining about unresolved plot points and stupid decisions. No, that's not true - I was complaining about some of those things during the movie as well. I've read rumors that Lucas or Spielberg (I think Lucas) expressed an interest in carrying on the series with LaBeouf as the lead adventurer and Harrison Ford in a mentor/cameo type of role. I might be OK with that actually, although really the problem here was not Ford's age but the bad script and lousy plot, both of which present much greater challenges if the same people make the next film. I'm actually surprised that Speilberg and Lucas spent all this time and effort to put together such a mediocre movie. Well, Lucas has been doing a lot of that lately, so that's not really a surprise, but I would have thought the least they could do would be to get a really top notch script and story and, most of all, a decent ending. Although come to think of it, Spielberg has used pretty much this exact ending before in other movies, so maybe he thinks it actually is really good. He's wrong.

Future Compliant, May 17, 2008

Ricko — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:56:26 -0500

I was having a debate with an old high school friend a couple years ago about the war in Iraq. We hadn't seen each other in quite a while, and he'd grown up more than a little right of center and I'd drifted far to the left, so our points of view were quite different as you might imagine. Still, he's a smart guy, and it was a spirited debate, but soon it became frustrating. He was smart enough to see the obvious - there was no defending the war as a good decision, not even strategically and in no possible way morally. It had been a disaster. So he didn't try to win that argument. Instead he decided to continually shift the grounds of debate. I tried not to let him draw us away from the topic at hand, but he kept coming up with more and farther afield digressions. The last one was a "fact" that I'd never heard before. That the suffering of innocents in the Iraq war paled in comparison to the tens of millions who've died from malaria as a direct result of the ban on the pesticide DDT in Africa. I'd never heard that, didn't know anything about it, and so couldn't argue with him. Given the source and how slippery he'd been all evening, I didn't believe him, but without any facts at hand I wasn't prepared to say as much. And so the debate ended. Well, maybe we argued about nationalized health care after that, I'm not sure. That might have been before.

So I went home and looked it up. Surprise, surprise, it's a whole load of BS. I wanted to call him up and tell him, but that felt petty and might seem well, a little obsessive on my part. Besides, he didn't really care about the truth of it or not. It was just a debating point. As it turns out, the central premise is false. DDT was not ever banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in some countries to this day. There were calls for restricting its use in agriculture as a pesticide, not just because of the health effects, but also because overuse would cause strains of mosquitoes to evolve that were resistant to DDT (which is what ended up happening in any event). Even the numbers quoted by the DDT "supporters" like my friend were inflated beyond the actual malaria deaths. A whole bunch of baloney. But it gets better. As this recent article outlines in fascinating detail, the whole DDT myth was caused not by some pro-DDT interest per se, but rather by people funded by tobacco companies as part of a larger effort to call legitimate science into question and thus help them in their various battles against smoking regulations and law suits.

This inanity is the very opposite of being future compliant. This is trading in a reality based world view, stirring up needless controversy, and accusing innocents of mass murder all to make more money. It's driving the world backwards as fast as you can so you can pick up the money that falls out of their pockets as they slip back down the mountainside. What idiocy, what monstrousness. And then there's the minor, but annoying collateral damage - it gives right wingers like my old high school friend bogus arguments to bolster their prejudices against environmental regulation. It gives them false outs in their thinking that let them somehow thing that killing hundreds of thousands of people isn't so bad because the environmentalists killed tens of millions. It's just galling, isn't it?

So again, read the articles - Here's the published version and here's the longer version on the author's blog.

Last week I talked about the nasty business of customs agents assuming the right to search through the data on our hard drives when we cross borders. I also mentioned that there were more than a few ways to get around this ridiculous privacy invasion. Well, one of them is TrueCrypt, a free, open source encryption program that you can use to encrypt all or part of your hard drive. I'm going to install this on my laptop sometime this week, and I'll get back to you when I've played with it some more. Until then, here's a description from the company's Web site describing in part how it works:

"Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on-the-fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on-the-fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM. Note that this does not mean that the whole file that is to be encrypted/decrypted must be stored in RAM before it can be encrypted/decrypted. There are no extra memory (RAM) requirements for TrueCrypt. For an illustration of how this is accomplished, see the following paragraph.

Let's suppose that there is an .avi video file stored on a TrueCrypt volume (therefore, the video file is entirely encrypted). The user provides the correct password (and/or keyfile) and mounts (opens) the TrueCrypt volume. When the user double clicks the icon of the video file, the operating system launches the application associated with the file type - typically a media player. The media player then begins loading a small initial portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) in order to play it. While the portion is being loaded, TrueCrypt is automatically decrypting it (in RAM). The decrypted portion of the video (stored in RAM) is then played by the media player. While this portion is being played, the media player begins loading next small portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) and the process repeats. This process is called on-the-fly encryption/decryption and it works for all file types, not only for video files."

Media Glutton, May 13, 2008

Ricko — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:51:37 -0500

I want to confess one of my new guilty pleasures. Last summer I started work on a project that will probably never see the light of day, but it involved doing a heck of a lot of research about modern and classic stage magic, including interviewing magicians and some of the engineers who build tricks. It was pretty freaking cool. As a result, I developed what will probably be an abiding interest in magic and magicians, while at the same time learning just enough to be an annoyingly picky spectator. I'm definitely in the "those who can't, criticize" half of the equation as opposed to the "those who can, do" half. Well, I know one cool mind reading trick, but I flub it about half the time I try. The point is, I think magic's cool, and there's not much magic on TV these days, so I take what I can get. Right now that means watching VH1's Celebracadabra. It's exactly what it sounds like - d-list celebrities learning to do magic tricks and competing with each other each week. Like Dancing With the Stars, but with magic. And the fact that I hadn't heard of half the stars on the show tells you something about who they got to sign on, but that's OK. Because here's the thing: it's actually a pretty good show. The stars (except one) are really trying to learn these illusions and they have real, professional magicians as coaches. The show doesn't reveal how any of the tricks are done, which I think is a good thing, but it does give you an interesting behind the scenes look at magic. I'll still call it a guilty pleasure, but it's one I think more people than magic nerds like me will enjoy. Also, the new magic podcast, Magic Wire, has been doing excellent long interviews with the judges, magician coaches, and some of the celebs from the show. These are really entertaining and informative as well, and have added a whole new dimension to my enjoyment of the series.

Here's something else I feel guilty about. I think the last few episodes of Battlstar Galactica have been sort of dull. There's a lot that's still great about them, but things are moving along very, very slowly. And there was a whole b-plot this week with the President and some visions that, while being excellent character development stuff for her, just ground the show to a screeching halt every time it came on. And not an exciting screech, but instead a really dull, makes you want to fast forward screech. I put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of show-runner Ronald Moore. Why? Well, because I felt the same way about his season of Carnivale - lots of great, great stuff, but also drawn out and slow and needlessly ponderous at times. Galactica hasn't always been that way, but it sure has seemed that way lately. I think it'll start to pick up this next week as various threads start to come together, but these past few weeks have smacked of creators in love with their ideas and the inner lives of their characters to the point were concerns of plot and pacing slip a little bit. The show's still solid, I'm still looking forward to more and more of it, but for me anyway these last few episodes have been a slump (again, despite lots of cool stuff happening).

This past week I also read a hot new political book that's all the rage in the left leaning blogosphere - Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement. I guess the rap on Taibbi is he's sort of this generations Hunter Thompson, except he stopped doing drugs and is more about going "undercover" and having wild adventures instead of just being himself and having wild adventures. I enjoyed his first book, Spanking The Donkey, but I like this new one much more, even though it suffers some from being unfocused and kind of all over the place. Taibbi admits as much himself from the intro, explaining how the book really is the synthesis of three different ideas that he worked on at different times and sort of forced together. The heart of the book tells of his time "undercover" as a member of Texas Pastor Hagee's megachurch in San Antonio. Here he gives us detailed, hilarious, and occasionally heart wrenching, but always on some level depressing accounts of life inside a church where the pastor and most of the giant congregation believe that the end is nigh and that all we need to do is help Israel out so we can usher in Armageddon. It's nutty stuff to be sure, and Taibbi has lucked out in that since doing his research, John MacCain has actively courted and received John Hagee's endorsement. And the stuff he says is just as offensive and crazy, if not more so, than anything Rev. Wright ever said. This part of The Great Derangement is just about perfect, not too long, not too short. The second section is about how Congress really works these days, focusing first on Republican and then Democratic shenanigans over ear marks. All this stuff is good too, although there's not quite enough of it for my tastes. There's sort of one detailed example from each Congress with not much in the way of synthesis or analysis. Finally Taibbi takes on the 9/11 "Truthers," those deluded conspiracy minded maniacs like the Loose Change jerks who've come up with all sorts of outlandish, unproven, evidence-free conspiracies around 9/11. One of the highlights of the book for me is a fictional transcritpit of the kind of discussion that must have taken place between Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others if the ridiculous conspiracy theories had any basis in fact. He does a terrific job of pointing out just how far fetched it all really is.

I blew through The Great Derangement in a day and a half and really enjoyed it. If any of that sounds interesting to you, then by all means, pick up a copy for yourself. And go see Iron Man. Did I mention that recently? I love that movie...

Future Compliant, May 11, 1008

Ricko — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:06:59 -0500

Cory Doctorow has a new book out this past week, and normally that would be something for my Media Glutton series, but in this case I think it falls squarely under the heading of future compliance. I was lucky enough to read the book several months ago when Cory sent me an electronic version to look at. By the way, you can download your own electronic version of the book for free right here if you like. Cory's following a trend that I have mixed feelings about, although less so in this case than most of the time - he's written a novel for Young Adults instead of for a more traditional sci-fi audience. When China Mieville did that for his last novel I was disappointed, because while Un-Lun-Dun was full of Mieville's imagination and style, it wasn't the thick literary soup that I love from him. With Little Brother, Cory has made the transition to Young Adult without giving up much of his normal techie style, and while the plot and characterizations might be slightly two-dimensional in some regards (especially compared to the bizarre yet compelling characters of his last novel), it all works and the story's a fast, exciting, fun read. Also, who knew you could say "tranny whore" in a young adult novel?

But that's not what makes the book future compliant. Little Brother is a novel about hacker teens fighting the Department of Homeland Security. That sounds almost outrageous when I put it that way, but this story is much more deft than that and it builds up the protagonist's indignation in a realistic way that'll have you wanting to sign on to fight the man right along with him, even as he and you both are scared for how dangerous it is. Little Brother weaves in a great deal of technical knowledge and explanation along the way. Cory does a solid job of explaining sometimes very complicated security and hacking facts. And while I already knew most of the stuff he's teaching here, I think a newcomer to these topics will learn a lot. I love the idea of teaching through fiction, but it's a tricky business. This novel slips just a little from storytelling to pedagogy in a few places, but not egregiously so and never for very long. I'm not the first reviewer to say this - according to the back of the book it was Neil Gaiman - but I'd definitely love to put this book in the hands of as many precocious young teens as I could and see what kind of hacking adventures it inspires in them.

Plus, and here's the real future compliant part of the post, Cory's teamed up with Instructables.com to do a series of how-to posts covering different hacks, tricks, and techniques described in the book. Originally I thought this material might actually have been included in the physical book, which would have been awesome. But having them online is pretty cool too. So go here to see how to fry RFID tags, start flash mobs, find pinhole cameras, and other important skills for the modern teen. I really like this idea of including how-to and instructional material alongside fiction, and down the line as e-books make more inroads (and I, unlike Cory, think that they eventually will) it'll be great to see how the two are integrated. In the meantime, I'd like to see some more of this kind of thing in today's books. I'm thinking about incorporating some similar how-to hacking sections into my next Geek Mafia novel, either in the text itself or as an online component.

It's the kind of information you might find useful next time you're traveling back into the US from abroad. Customs has apparently decided that they have the right to look at everything on your laptop as you're crossing the border. I think this is beyond insane, but the government doesn't agree with me. The idea that we don't have a right to privacy over our own data when we fly from one country to another is absurd. There are ways around it, including encrypting the data on your drive. But then the chances are that if they really think you're hiding something, they'll just take it from you. Of course there are many, much more effecient ways to move encrypted data across international borders. The internet springs to mind as a useful conduit, although I guess Fed Ex might work too. The idea that border agents will accomplish anything worthwhile snooping around people's private files at the airport boggles my mind. One option is of course to load all your files onto a server somewhere in the internet and then erase them from your machine before you travel and then download them again when you get to the other side. Of course then you have to trust the server you're using, and even then the government might be able to snoop if they want. Did I ever mention that privacy is dying, if not all the way dead in this world of ours?

Media Glutton, May 8, 2008

Ricko — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:26:56 -0500

Media Glutton, April 29th 2008

OK, let's talk Iron Man. Iron Man freaking rocked. It was, for me, a great, great super hero movie, which is saying something, since there haven't been a lot of those. Moreover, it's a great super hero movie about a character that I've always liked in theory but seldom actually enjoyed in reality. But this movie takes the coolest, most interesting parts of Tony Stark/Iron Man and then puts them in the hands of RobertDowney Jr who just knocks the ball out of the park. When he was cast I thought he was perfect, but in reality he was more than perfect - he was transcendent. I mean that almost literally. His performance lifted the character into something more interesting than he's ever been in the comics. Plus he really pulled off what I think is one of the most appealing (to me) aspects of Tony Stark - he's a super sexy nerd. He's rich and famous and a sex symbol because he's a technological genius and a funny, personable, sarcastic dude. Geek as alpha male - what more can I ask for in a hero. So go and see the movie, and don't forget to stay through the credits to the very end.

I'm going to turn now to a twenty year old novel that I read over the weekend and just loved. I'm currently working my way through a low-residency MFA program and have been reading almost exclusively more "literary" novels on assignment. Most of it is stuff I would probably never have read on my own, which is great, because almost all of it has been really great. But Ian M Banks' sci-fi novel The Player of Games is definitely something I would have picked up, school or no school. I mean come on, it's a science fiction epic with a hero whose sole heroic qualification is that he's the greatest game player in the galaxy. And since it's set so far in the future, it had aged quite well - no embarrassing technological "innovations" that seem quaint by today's standards. But most important of all, it's a great, expertly told story that drives you right through to the end. And while its prose is not overly baroque or complicated, Banks' playful use of language and thrilling descriptions of invented games we never know the rules for make the tale all the more enchanting.

The past couple weeks also offered me a double-DVD helping of one of my favorite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman. First I watched Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, which is quite an experience. The movie is a crime drama of sorts, although the drama comes not from pulling off the crimes but from screwing them up in a tragic way and then suffering the consequences. the emphasis here is definitely on the drama, and the rapid, totally believable disintegration of both Hoffman's character and that of his brother, played expertly by EthanHawke . It's not a tough movie to watch, but it's definitely a tough movie. Not a lot of smiles and giggles going on here, but plenty of great acting, directing, and writing. The other film was Charlie Wilson's War, which stars Tom Hanks. I really enjoyed this movie as I was watching it, moving along from moment to moment, scene to scene, it sucks me right in and I liked it all. In retrospect it feels a little scattered in focus, and the end comes rushing on too quick. The plot, about a playboy congressman wheedling and conniving to provide arms for theAfghans to fight the Soviets in the 80's, rambles around a bit, focusing on one thing and then another. But the performances and writing are top notch (but then, I'm a huge AaronSorkin fanboy), and I definitely recommend renting it. Plus, hey, true story with relevance to our current life. What more could you ask for from a political thriller/comedy/drama?

This week Speed Racer opens, and originally I'd had no intention of seeing it. But it's been getting a lot of interesting, positive reviews from sources I generally trust, plus it's apparently an incredibly novel and maybe even strange film going experience, which makes it very hard for me to turn down. Now, I've always actually kind of hated everything about Speed Racer except for the theme song, so I'm still going in with low expectations. Plus it's a kids movie, which is fine in theory, but it means the theater might be full of kids, which may or may not be fine in practice depending on howcurmudgeonly I'm feeling.

Next week I'll give you a longer review of Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement, which I'm finishing up now. It's quite a ride. Until then, see Iron Man! Read Player of Games! Rent Before the Devil Knows You're Dead! Go forth an be gluttons.

Future Compliant, May 3, 2008

Ricko — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:24:43 -0500

Future Compliant May 3 2008

I'm computing in the clouds right now. I've written about this new buzz-word trend before - the idea that all your computing needs will live in the data clouds of the internet, available to you anywhere where you have some bandwidth at your disposal. I'm on record as loving the idea. As much as I like my various computers, I hate being tied down to any single one of them. I've got three different machines that I use for different purposes (although really that could be 2, maybe), and I've had to either move files back and forth between them or just limit one kind of work to one particular machine. For some annoying software (looking at you itunes and audible.com), I'm mostly stuck on one device, but the more I can free my data up, the happier I am.

This week I dived full on in to Google Docs. Indeed I'm using it right now in the coffee shop with my EeePC running linux and using downtown Sarasota's free wi-fi. I'll finish it up later on my other, bigger Ubuntu laptop when I get home. Google Docs made the crucial leap for me recently when they added an off-line component to the software. Up until that point hated the idea that I'd have to be online in order to get work done. That would be pretty worthless on a plane or in an airport that doesn't have free wi-fi or, well, sometimes this coffee shop. That free internet is less than 100% reliable. I didn't even consider using the software before Google remedied that oversight.

Now I've been using it for a week solid, writing not only these blog posts, but also working hard on starting my new novel, the third in my Geek Mafia series. I intend to write the whole first draft of the new book on Google Docs, although I'm saving off a copy in Open Office to my local hard drive every day, just to be safe. Google Docs doesn't have nearly the functionality of a full-on word processor, but it turns out it has all the functions I actually use on a regular basis. I can seamlessly edit the book from each of my computers and not have to worry about synching up different versions. I do have to be a little careful when I work offline that I make sure I upload the latest version from my offline computer before I edit it with another one, but so far that hasn't been a problem.

I'm also interested to see how well the sharing tools work. You can open the documents to other google docs users to either just read or also edit. Since I rely a great deal on the kind and helpful input of friends ad family on my early drafts, it will be interesting to see how many of them I can suck in to using Google Docs' collaborative tools and how useful I will actually find them. I have a couple of other, smaller projects (and one far off, much larger one) that I plan to work with co-authors on, where we would both have access to the document and would build it up together. Google Docs then tracks who made what changes so you can keep on eye on each other's progress and additions. I think that's how it's supposed to work anyway. I'll let you know how it goes.

There are down sides of course. The first one that springs to my mind is privacy. The fact that all my documents and data are sitting on Google's servers somewhere, subject to internal or federal inspection (with or without a warrant?) cannot be ignored. I can say that I would never put anything up on Google Docs that I didn't intend to some day be public. I consider the early drafts of a novel to be private of course, but there's not going to be anything in there that I really want to be forever private. Although in this day in age, if it's something I really want to keep private, then I just never commit it to digital form at all - it's the only way to be safe.

Since I've spent all this space and time recommending a privacy smashing but useful Google app, I want to assuage my paranoid guilt and point you in the direction of a cool tool from the Chaos Computer Club that you can use to help actually preserve your privacy some. It's called anonbox, and it's a private server that lets you set up totally anonymous, one time e-mail programs that you can use to sign up for Web sites and other services that require a real, working e-mail address to use. For example, some government archive sites, many newspaper archive sites, and a wide variety of others all require an e-mail address to set up a "free account." Maybe you have no interest in living forever in their databases, on record as having downloaded a specific file. I can certainly understand that. Anonbox offers a great, free work around for those situations - another fine service from the kings of future compliance, the Chaos Computer Club.

Media Glutton, April 30, 2008

Ricko — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:49:25 -0500

Grand Theft Auto Glutton

I hadn't really planned on playing, much less buying Grand Theft Auto 4. I'd tried the last two games, and while I could see that they were well made games and had a certain appeal, they just didn't do anything for me. It wasn't the violence or the language or the protagonists fundamental lack of morals or sociability. I'm cool with all that stuff in games. Nor was it the sex and language. I'm cool with that even outside of video games. No, for me it was the driving. I just don't much care for driving games. I'm not good at them, I don't have fun playing them, and, well, I just don't care much. I put up with all the driving in the great Simpson's Road Rage game because the character and story and humor content was so great, but I never got far enough in the previous Grand Theft Auto games to get sucked into the stories or care about the characters, which just left the driving. Which in turn just left me playing something else.

Despite my studied indifference to the new release of GTA 4, the hype started to get to me. First came all those reviews with the perfect scores. Best game in years according to some. An experience not to be missed. OK, I started to feel some sort of obligation to try it out and see what all the fuss was about. Then G4 TV tarted giving it wall to wall overage and I got even more sucked in. Then they were saying it was going to be the biggest, best selling release in video game history - maybe even in media history. They expected to sell 9 million copies in the first week, which by my calculations would be a gross sale number of over $500 dollars. That's crazy! But also cool. Good for video games. And then something snapped in my brain. Maybe it was the fact that it was also the 4 year anniversary of the release of the video game I helped design, City of Heroes. Maybe it was just media saturation. Maybe I've developed an addiction to release-day lines at my local Game Stop. Whatever. With 30 minutes before they closed I drove over Monday night and put my money down so I could be one of the lucky millions to have a copy on day one.

And yesterday morning at 10:30 there was a line, and I waited in it. I waited and texted about the fact that I was waiting, which seems sort of digitally decadent of me. There were 30 or 40 of us total in the otherwise mostly empty mall. I then proved my adulthood by actually going home and working on my new novel for a few hours before I actually loaded the game into my X-Box 360 and fired it up. I was excited. The intro was cool. It looked great. The first thing you do is drive a damn car...

You drive a car and for five minutes I hated it. But all the time the story is unfolding around you, as is the really well designed and rendered city you're driving through. The voice acting and dialog are both top notch - as good as I've ever experienced. The characters may be very familiar in tone and spirit, with little that seems groundbreaking at first but they're familiar in a way that feels right rather than cliched. They have depth and dimension and, while I'd hate hanging out with them in real life, they're immensely compelling as protagonists in a crime drama. As the story eased me into the world, the game play eased me into the whole driving, and later the car jacking and the shooting. It all builds up seamlessly, one element after another. I drove my cousin to a poker game. I went out on some dates. I drove a getaway car, I helped run a protection racket, I became a gunman for a drug dealer, I killed someone in cold blood. It all fit, it all made sense in the game's twisted world, and most importantly of all, it was all a hell of a lot of fun. By the time I went to bed, I'd played about 5 and a half hours of Grand Theft Auto 4, and if I hadn't come here to the coffee shop to get work done, I'd probably be fighting the urge to play some more right now.

At 5 or so hours, the game tells me I've completed about 10% of the game's content. I'm going to take my time with it and reall let myself explore some of the smaller, hidden moments in the game, because often that's where the humor is hidden. Like the TV shows you can sit and watch in your apartment (including a great Halo goof), or the DJ's on the radio stations as you drive around, or the little mini-games. And oh my god, the magic show I went to on my third date with Michele - hilarious. A lot of the game is hilarious in fact, even in some of its darkest moments. It never takes itself too seriously, but it also doesn't undermine its own drama either - that's a fine line to walk, and I congratulate the writers/designers for bringing it all together so adeptly. I've now played more of GTA 4 than I did of the predecessors combined, and there's no way I'm stopping now. Hell, I even like the driving parts now.

Media Glutton April 23, 2008

Ricko — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:39:58 -0500

Media Glutton April 22nd 2008

by Rick Dakan

I really do like PBS. It makes up a surprising amount of my TV watching each week, pretty much entirely for their non-fiction and commentary shows like Charlie Rose, Nova, Bill Moyers, and Frontline. Those are all great, interesting, high quality programs. Nova in particular is the gold standard of science television, and puts most of what you see on other science channels to shame. And let's not eve talk about the alien-loving, ghost-mongering, sensationalist claptrap that is The History Channel (the gold standard for low standards). But Frontline is probably my favorite. Even-handed, well researched, compellingly produced, it makes even subjects I'm not interested in fascinating. When they cover something I really care about, I'm beyond sucked in - I'm enthralled. And here's the other great thing about Frontline - they put their whole shows up online, plus lots of bonus material, making the information available all the time to anyone.

Last week's great episode was about a topic that I care a great deal about, a topic that is a national embarrassment here in the United States - health care. Many Americans who really should know better have some sort of visceral objection to nationalized or single payer health care systems. They cling to the delusion that the US system is the best in the world and that universal health care means endless waiting lists, low standards of care, and lack of choice. They cherry-pick the worst anecdotes they can remember and extrapolate the rest, forgetting that the plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not data. Thankfully Frontline, along with many actual researchers over the years, has gone out and collected the data and hopefully dispelled many of the myths about universal health care programs around the world.

I read several reviews that described this episode, "Sick Around the World," as the movie they wish Michael Moore's Sicko had been, and I think that's spot on. It's not as funny as Sicko, nor does it pull heart strings the way Moore's movie did. It has less of a political agenda and is focused more on general policy issues than specific case studies (although it has those too). The premise is simple - the undeniable fact is that the US pays a lot more for health care than anyone else in the world and gets significantly less bang for their buck. This show simply goes to several different countries that offer complete coverage - The UK, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and Switzerland - and compares their pros and cons to our system. Taiwan is interesting because they came to universal health care more recently and borrowed elements from several different systems. Switzerland is where the broadcast concludes, because they had a free market system just like ours but then made what was at the time a very controversial switch, a switch that has since proved very popular. I recommend watching the whole thing, or at the very least taking some time to poke around the Frontline site and look at the info they have there. Unless you're a health care expert, you'll definitely learn something and either hae your own mind changed about universal health care or get some good data that will help you convince others.

In lighter media gluttony news, I watched a really sweet little romantic comedy last night on DVD. That's not a sentence I'm likely to write very of Jeff Garlin (of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame), and this was written and directed by and stars him. I'm always interested in seeing artist's passion projects come to life. It's a small movie with Garlin's trademark low-key, self deprecating humor and also features Sarah Silverman. Plus I love the title: I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. So if you're in the mood for something quirky, light, and slightly amateurish, give this one a try. The only thing that annoys me about it is that it's from the Weinstein Company, which makes fine films but has this ridiculous exclusive deal with Blockbuster where only they are supposed to be able to rent out Weinstein DVD's. But of course that's not enforceable. I got my copy through Netflix. It seems just stupid, but maybe it's actually dishonestly clever - they get paid by Blockbuster and then paid again when the other rental outlets buy retail copies to rent out to their customers. Either way though it's kind of obnoxious.

Finally, some media news from a few weeks back, but not really out of date since it's about an event months in the future. Neal Stephenson had finally announced his next novel and it's supposed to be coming out in September! I'm so excited for this. I love all of Stephenson's huge, rambling technophiliac books, from Snow Crash to Diamond Age to Cryptonomicon to the Baroque Cycle. They're all massive and engaging and super smart. This new one, Anathem, is a little more sci-fi than his more recent stuff which is fine with me. Of course in typical Stephenson style, it's admittedly mostly a book about math that happens to have a (hopefully) intriguing plot wrapped around it. But that's exactly why I love Stephenson - he's a novelist of big ideas who makes science seem as cool as it really is. If you haven't ever read any of his stuff, go out ad do so now. Start with either Diamond Age (about nanotechnology) or Cryptonomicon (about, among many things, cryptography).

Media Glutton April 16, 2008

Ricko — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:15:15 -0500

Media Glutton

This past weekend I went up to New York City to do some readings and help promote my Geek Mafia and Geek Mafia: Mile Zero at the NY Anarchist Book Fair. It was a pretty interesting experience all things considered. I did two events at the wonderful Blue Stockings Books, a collectively run radical book store that is a great locus for reading, activism, and hanging out. I had a reading there Friday night which was, well, not packed. Still, it was fun. Then the next night wa part of a group salon of authors and artists and we had the place filled to the gills, which was awesome. I had a great time ad encourage anyone in NY to stop by the store and see what other events they've got coming up - they're always doing something cool.

The book fair itself was a little smaller than the one in San Francisco, but it's only in it's second year. The room got to sauna-levels of heat and humidity by the afternoon, but the location across the street from Washington Square was nice and let me slip out and get some air (and delicious street food) pretty much at will. Again, I was almost the only novel there and I'm not sure the attendees come looking for much in the way of fiction. I didn't do a reading or presentation this time, so without that to drive some interest there wasn't a whole lot. There was one other novelist there that I saw, but he was giving away copies of his book. I talked to him for a while and was surprised to find he'd printed up 10,000 copies and had been giving them away for a while now. It wasn't even really a marketing gimmick as far as I could tell - he just wanted to get his story out there. I'm sad to say the story didn't grab me at all as I tried to get through it that afternoon, but I admire his mad devotion to his art.

One of the cool new projects that I've come across is Josh MacPhee's new book of public domain art for use by activists. The book is called Reproduce & Revolt and is a really great idea. A committed activist and talented artist himself, Josh has long been tired of going to protests or meeting activists and trying to puzzles some meaning out of poorly designed, inscrutably laid out fliers and signs. Weirdly enough, I heard the hosts of the podcast This Week in Media complaining about much the same thing several weeks ago. Anyway, Josh and company did something about it and produced a cool book chock full of what I'd call "activist clip art." The images are there for the copying, ready to be transposed on to any media an activist might want to produce. The book is in Spanish and English and contains a cool section about the basics of layout and design. I talked to Josh extensively and I know he worked hard pulling all of this stuff together. The material will also be available for free download online in various formats. Good stuff.

When I got back home Monday night I got to catch up on some of the TV I'd missed, and of course I started with Battlestar Galactica. The season premiere had left me not quite disappointed but not quite totally freaking excited either. This second episode erased any doubts and sucked me right in to everything I'd been missing. First of all we get some exciting Cylon internal politics, which might not sound exciting (if you're crazy) but is in fact super interesting. And of the tuff on Galactica was really good too, and I like the way those story arcs are setting up - especially Baltar talking to an imaginary version of himself, which is so perfect. My enthusiasm is officially back to peak levels.

I didn't get out to the movies this last week - not only was I busy, but there was nothing out there that grabbed my interest. But there's always Netflix, and last night I watched There Will Be Blood again. That movie is just hypnotically good in my opinion. Daniel Day Lewis just sucks me in whenever he's on screen, and the music is so evocative I'm thinking of actually buying a film sound track for the first time in I don't know how many years. I wish there was a director's commentary on the disk, but I hear the bonus features disk is full of interesting stuff so I'll get that soon. Juno comes out on DVD this week and I haven't seen that yet, so I'm looking forward to that. After all the times I said, "I'll wait and see it on video," I now feel sort of obligated to do so, not that I mind. Soon the big action flicks will rocket our way, starting with Iron Man, which I'm really looking forward to. That I won't wait for video to see...

Media Glutton, April 9, 2008

Ricko — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:03:39 -0500

So this has been an unusual media week for me, a time to try out new things and experience stuff I don't do nearly as often as I should (besides eating enough vegetables). In reverse order then, we'll start with last night, when I went with friends up to Tampa to see an awesome band called Golem play at Skipper's Smokehouse. My friend told me they were a kind of punk/klezmer band, although having seen them I didn't really get a lot of punk vibe. I did however get a whole lot of Awesome! vibe and had a helluva good time. They're definitely rocking, but they're also very much about the Klezmer, with the accordian and violin front and center and most of the songs being sung in Yiddish. But there's also a trumpet, a bass guitar, and drums, which gives it all a kind of swing/rock thing which makes it that much more fun. I have developed a serious crush on the violinist, Alicia Jo Rabins, who works that fiddle to great effect, but that's not to short-shrift the rest of the band. They're all great, and the sort of co-leads, Annette Ezekiel (singing and accordion) and Aaron Diskin (vocals) are great, engaging performers who gave us they're all. And the way Annette handles that accordion is a sight to see. They're based out of New York, so if any of this sounds at all good to you, you should definitely go check them out. They'll be in Miami this Thursday and then next month they're playing at Joe's Pub in NY on May 13th.

Monday night I went and check out the Sarasota Film Festival's Sarasota Shorts collection, which featured four short films by local film makers, including one by my friends Austin and Sherrie McKinley. Weirdly enough, three of the films, including Austin's, featured hitmen (or women) killing people. They were all enjoyable and it was a really fun evening. All were shot here in Sarasota, so it was fun to see some familiar places and faces, including a guy from the gym I go to getting shot in a big gunfight. Only Austin's flick is up on youtube, so you can go see it here:

The week before that I got sucked into the addictive rock and roll world of the videogame Rock Band. Now, I've resisted the siren song of Guitar Hero like music games for several years. I like kicks and explosions in my games. I like running around and shooting things or commanding vast armies or doing something weird with the Wii controller. Over Christmas a friend of mine tried to get me to play Rock Band but I declined. Well, that same friend sucked me into a game while I was in California and I finally figured out what all the fuss is about. OK, I haven't actually figured out what the fuss is really about, but I do know this - the game's damn fun and stupidly addictive. And I think there's some real value to it as well. It's not just about pushing the right colored button at the right time - to get good at the game you actually have to listen to the music and learn how it's put together. As someone with no musical talent to speak of, I find that a really interesting, valuable experience. Nothing like playing a real instrument of course, but I'm not going to play a real instrument anytime soon (or ever probably), so for me it opens up a realm of experience previously closed to me. I may only be seeing the tiniest sliver of that world, but, right now at least, that's all I really want anyway.

The other big media event in my life anyway was the Season 4 Premiere of Battlestar Galactica. There was an incredible amount of hype for the premiere, and the show had a lot of expectations to live up to. Naturally enough, it didn't manage to do that. It was still a good solid episode and I'm excited the show's back on the air, but it didn't blow me out of my seat like the Season 3 premiere did. But it didn't make any mistakes either, and it built on the finale in good ways. I'm excited to see what comes next, but there weren't any huge "Awesome!" moments for me this past week. But I have faith that they're coming in the months to come.

Media Glutton, April 2 2008

Ricko — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:18:42 -0500

So I've been reading a lot this past week, mostly for my MFA program and thus nothing you would call new or even terribly recent stuff. Great stuff, but nothing you haven't heard about a bunch of other places before. I'm more interested here in highlighting new and/or relatively unknown content, although I might write up the book I'm reading (and enjoying) now once I'm finished later this week.

But I did get to see The Mist on DVD, written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on Stephen King's novella. I'd listened to a really great audio version of this story many, many years ago, but all I remembered was people trapped in a grocery store by some creepy mist with crazy monsters in it. As it turns out, that's about all there is to remember, but it's also enough. This is a really solid, fun, survivor/horror movie, with some cool monsters, some unusual and interesting character arcs, and an ending that some people probably hate but I really love (although you couldn't call it the feel good hit of the summer by any means). The special effects are OK. Apparently the Blu-Ray disk has a black and white version on it, which I think might actually be pretty cool. I don't know that I've ever seen black and white CGI monsters before, but maybe that would make them look a little more realistic. If you like monster movies, check this one out.

I also saw this announcement about doing a big budget movie version Huxley's Brave New World. I'm pretty excited about this one. It's great to see Ridley Scott doing sci-fi again of course, and I like the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio's behind it as well (read the article linked to to see why). I know a lot of people are anti-DiCaprio, but they're just being weird and reactionary, probably a hangover from the horrifying Titanic-phenom days last decades. The fact is, he gives good to great performances in good to great movies again and again, and usually takes on pretty interesting roles. I loved him in The Aviator for instance, and Blood Diamond is a really solid, entertaining-yet-thought-provoking flick.

I actually ready Brave New World in college as part of my science for non-scientists general education requirement class, Great Experiments In Biology. We read it as a way of examining some of the science, ethics, and morality issues that biology raises. I think it was a really useful way to approach science education, especially for all of us liberal arts majors, and I enjoyed the book a lot. We then had to write papers about future technologies that looked like they might be controversial in some way. I picked nanotechnology, which was nowhere near the household word it is now back in 1992 when I was in the class. I think I'll try and find time to re-read the book this year in anticipation of the film.

Microsoft has announced that the X-Box Live service is going to start creating original content. I think this is a great idea myself. The more ways we have for getting original content into people's homes, the better as far as I'm concerned. They've signed on with a mixed bag of creative heads for this project, including the awful human beings responsible for those cheap, stupid, insulting "parody" movies like Meet The Spartans. That's not a good sign. I guess Microsoft looked at how much money those pics make compared to how cheap they are to produce and said "Yes please, more of that." And I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that there's some marketing study that shows a high overlap between the mouthbreathing teens who see those movies and the core users of X-Box Live. Still, we shouldn't encourage this kind of thing.

On the other hand, we should encourage people like Penn of Penn & Teller (actually, encourage Teller too, they're both great). I used to love listening to his daily radio show (or rather, the podcast of it), and was really sad when it went off the air. I agree with Penn on about 85% of what he says, which is pretty good given how contrarian I generally am. But then, so is Penn. And even the stuff I don't agree with him on (mostly his love of Ayn Rand and some of his libertarian beliefs that stem from it), I can at least admire his intellectual honesty and thoughtfulness about. So I'm super pleased he's got a semi-regular video cast that he does. Now, 5 minute blocks of Penn aren't really all I'm looking for - I love to hear him go on and on and on. However, this is all we've got, and so I'll take it. Plus if you're a Dancing With The Stars fan (which I'm not), you'll find out a lot about his experiences on the show.

Finally I came across these pics from the abandoned Chinese Government sponsored theme park in Orlando, Splendid China. I visited the park with my brother well over a decade ago when I was doing research for my very first book Dark Kingdom of Jade. The majority of the park was elaborate miniatures of various famous sites from all around China. They also had performers and stage shows and stuff. I still remember vividly the very cool quick-mask-change street performer guy. I'm not surprised it failed - there were no rides, and it was really hot - it needed to either have most of the complicated dioramas inside or at least add in a lot more shade. This is Florida after all. Now it's all but gone, just some eerie abandoned miniature ruins left. Creepy and cool.

Media Glutton, March 26, 2008

Ricko — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:40:05 -0500

Media Glutton, March 26, 2008

by Rick Dakan

So I had a rather unusual but quite exciting media overload experience this past weekend - spoke and worked my publisher's table at the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. It was, in fact, a lot of fun, and really quite strange on occasion. Not that I'm unfamiliar with the strange. I've been to gaming conventions and hacker conventions and sci-fi conventions and comics conventions and academic conferences. I've seen people in weird costumes, history professors doing "this little piggy" in latin with their infants, and impassioned, glorious rants on everything from civil rights to secure computing to what makes a good gaming experience. So from that point of view, the Anarchist Book Fair was very familiar, although all the details, issues, and glorious rants were new to me (in person anyway - I've read quite a bit of anarchist writings and written some myself in a way).

I was there promoting my own books, Geek Mafia, and the sequel, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero on behalf of myself and my wonderful new publisher, PM Press. New not only to me, but to everyone else as well, as they're only a few months old (although the people who make up PM have decades of publishing experience and contacts). I gave various version of my one-line sales pitch for Geek Mafia that I've said thousands of times before, although I tried a couple variations in an effort to appeal to this crowd's particular tastes. There wasn't a lot of other fiction at this predominantly serious-minded event, so I think my book there was both a little bit of fresh air and maybe a little confusing. People seemed a little unsure as to how fiction fit into the broader themes and politics of the event and movement, but once we explained out goal of coming at those same themes from another angle and persepctive, most people really liked the idea. In one of my talks this weeken I likened my books to a big helping of ice cream with some little vitamins of politics and inspiration slipped in there. Mostly they're about the fun and the exciting stories, but there's stuff in there to make you think too.

With that in mind, I thought I'd highlight a few other forms of radical fictional ice cream that I particularly admire and would encourage anyone to go out and read (right after they go out and read my stuff of course).

The Dispossesed by Ursula K LeGuin

This is, for me anyway, the perfect piece of anarchist sci-fi literature. Now, granted, there isn't a lot of competition in the field, but it's also just a great piece of fiction on any scale of measurement. It's the only piece of fiction I know of that really shows how a truly anarchist society might actually work, and it's by no means a utopian vision. But it's not necessarily unappealing either. What it is, is thought provoking which is all you can ask of a story really. It set my mind wandering to other possibilities and contemplating other modes of living and organizing society. I talked about it during my presentation at the book fair and I was really surprised how few of the people there had read it. Then again, as I said, they weren't a huge sci-fi crowd.

The Iron Council by Chine Mieville

I love me some China Mieville. He's one of the most imaginative, origial voisces in weird fiction writing these days, and his three greatest books, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council are brilliant, dense, captivating pieces of fiction. They're all set in the same weird, dark pseudo-Victorian fantasy world, but each one stands entirely distinct from the others. There's magic, itrigue, strange science, big fights, and cool monsters of course, everything you want from a sci-fi or fantasy story. But there's also a lot of cool radical politics slipped in, especially in The Iron Council which features a workers revolt where the abused laborers literally take control of the means of prodution and then driving them away. Mieville himself is a movement activist and has a PhD in economics with a Marxist outlook. But don't let the politics throw you off - this a story first and foremost, and the radical ideology in there moves the story forward rather than weighing it down ad turing it into a lecture. Just the way it should be.

Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon

I have no idea what the politics of this book are. I'm listenind to the unabrdiged audiobook, which is 52 hours long and I'm only 4 hours in. But already it's much weirder and more wonderful than anything I expected, a delightful surprise that happens to combine many of my various obsessions/interests. Set in the later part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, this sprawling American epic features anarchists, detectives, alcemists, photographers, dirigible flying crime pulp crime fighters, and even sentient ball lightning. I had no idea the book would contain such wild, pulpy aspects when I read the blurb. I was more intrigued to see how Pynchon would handle the turn of the century anarchist scene, which was orders of magnitude larger and more influential than it is today. But wow, there is so much more going on here. I'm not going to go so far as to recommend it yet since I'm only a fraction of the way into the story, but if anything I've mentioned so far catches your fancy, then by all means check this hefty tome out. And if you finish before I do, drop me a line and I'll post your review.