Category Archives: Culture

Book Review : Two Non-Fiction Books on Destruction

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The Wizard of Lies By Diana B. Henriques

A relatively recent book on the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, including information straight from the man himself. I got this hoping for an exciting and twisty crime story about a master criminal, but it turns out the Madoff’s scheme was stupidly simple – he lied about some stuff and keep lying. He wasn’t even very clever about it, but somehow managed to keep the house of cards upright for decades.

Henriques’ book covers a huge amount of ground – going back to Madoff’s childhood upbringing to his peak as a pillar of the New York community. A huge amount of research has been distilled into a very readable story – just about everyone who ever met Madoff seems to have been interviewed, and enough time has passed that the full effects of the scam have been revealed. I just wish that the crime was more ingenious.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing

Death From the Skies! By Philip Plait

Plait runs the popular Bad Astronomy blog which is far more interesting than it has any right to be, this book is even better. There are many books that seek to explain the wonders of the universe in an entertaining way, but Death From the Skies! is the only one that takes the “How could this kill us all” approach. From supernovas to comets, Plait runs down the numbers and details exactly what would happen to the Earth should such misfortune strike (spoiler: it doesn’t look good).

Plait clearly explains the concepts behind familiar astronomical terms and breaks down the magnitude (usually way to large large) and probability (usually not small enough) of each occurrence. It’s all very entertaining, but not something you want to read straight before going to sleep.

Highly recommended

Book Review : Cryptic and Oceanic – Two SciFi Short Story Collections

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Cryptic : The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

Cover of Cryptic by Jack McDevittA mammoth collection of scifi short stories by the prolific Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has an old-fashioned manner and his stories remind me strongly of the tales from the 50s and 60s that I grew up reading – this is not a bad thing.

Not every story is a corker, but most are good and some are downright excellent. My one complaint is that they tend to be rather constant in tone and style, I finished the book yesterday and the stories are all starting to blend together in my head.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing

Oceanic By Greg Egan

Cover of Oceanic by Greg EganAnother collection of Scifi short stories, this time by Greg Egan. Egan is a programmer, and his stories are hard-as-diamond tales of artificial life, strange physical frontiers behind every atom, and clear-eyed researchers heroically hunched over keyboards in darkened rooms. Great stuff, and this collection really shows his ferocious imagination and range as a writer. The title story (full text here) in particular is a very well done piece that packs a lot of depth into a few pages.

Highly recommended

Reading Old Books

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I have been going through a phase of reading old, out-of-copyright books – partly because I find it fascinating to see how various literary forms evolved over time, partly because if you go back far enough the books read like science-fiction – alien concepts and strange customs abound, partly because it allows me to affect an air of being well read, but mostly because you can download them for free from Project Gutenberg and I am a cheap bastard.

A Voyage to the South Sea by William Bligh

Cover of A Voyage to the South SeaA while ago I read The Bounty by Caroline Alexander, a modern account of Captain Bligh’s famous-for-all-the-wrong-reasons expedition to Tahiti aboard The Bounty. It focused mainly on what happened after everyone got home again. This book is the tale told by the man himself, compiled by Bligh from his logs kept during the voyage and it is a fascinating read. Even if there wasn’t a (spoiler alert!) mutiny, it would make for a cracking story as Bligh has an eye for both nautical detail during the voyage and a keen interest in how Tahitian society (very different to the English system) worked after The Bounty arrives.

And breadfruit, the dude was obsessed with breadfruit.

Once the mutiny occurs, the story turns into an epic struggle of survival as Bligh and his few remaining crew find that people treat you differently when you turn up on their island without a fully armed three-masted collier anchored just outside their reef.

It is a real pleasure to drop into the world of a competent person doing an interesting job. Since it is taken directly from his meticulous logs there is a charming matter-of-fact style as things unfold without foreshadowing or subplots. The one problem for a modern reader is that it is almost impossible to avoid hearing the text being read in James T. Kirk’s Captain’s Log voice; the style is exactly the same.

A Journey of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

Cover for Journal of the Plague YearThis early novel in the form of a diary purports to be a day-to-day account of the life of a young London man during the 1665 outbreak of the black plague as people were dying in their thousands. Defoe did actually live through the plague but he was only 5 at the time, so the story is fictionalized but obviously carefully researched. Defoe uses the experiences of the narrator to highlight how various aspects of society (the rich, the poor, etc) reacted to the plague, maintaining a detached tone while horrible things are occurring on all sides. The thing that struck me the most was the general atmosphere of resigned bewilderment that permeates the book – nobody in pre-germ theory London really understands what is going on but society continues on as best as it can while people are dropping dead and whole streets worth of houses are empty or contain only corpses.

After reading lots of disaster fiction (The Day of the Triffids, Dawn of the Dead, etc) I was heartened to see that people do not automatically devolve into angry, paranoid mobs during a real life events that kill a large percentage of the population, although plenty of isolated complete bastardry apparently will occur.

The Battle of the Safes, or, British Invincibles Versus Yankee Ironclads by George Augustus Sala

And now for something completely different. During the Paris Exhibition of 1867 a public relations spat broke out between a British firm of safe makers and an upstart American firm as to who made the safest safes. This was apparently a big deal in an age when people kept large amounts of cash on hand.

The American firm challenged the British to a public demonstration where each firm nominated a crack team to break into the other’s safe in the shortest possible time. Everything should be simple but the Americans (boo-hiss) keep changing the rules in their favour. Eventually the contest comes to an unsatisfying conclusion but everyone can see that the British (yeay!) have scored a great moral victory.

This is a short, enjoyable, one-sided account of an inconsequential event, filled with all kinds of intrigue and skullduggery. Nothing really gets resolved but it doesn’t matter unless you are really into safes (and the illustrations are great.)

Illustration from The Battle of the Safes - the American safe lies open

Foo Fighters

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I unexpectedly went to the Foo Fighters concert yesterday.

Panoramic Photo of Auckland Foo Fighter ConcertClick to enlarge

Unexpectedly because I wasn’t planning on going, but a friend had to pull out and I bought her ticket. That was also unexpected, because I don’t really dig the Foo Fighters.

I mean, I think they are OK. Acceptable. Competent. But lacking in that spark that I look for in a rock band.

The weather was not good, it had rained all afternoon and Western Springs Raceway was already soggy when we turned up so we staked a spot on the terraces and watched the support acts. We missed local heroes, Cairo Knife Fight, a band I know nothing about except that bFM name checks them constantly but never actually plays their tracks.

The second support act was Fucked Up – a canadian punk/death metal outfit who should have been terrible but come over very well. The lead singer left the stage and spent most of the set wandering around the crowd hugging people and occasionally drinking their beer between verses.

Next came the highlight of the evening for me – Tenacious D. For a joke band they did a tight set and Jack Black is genuinely funny on stage.

Finally, the Foo Fighters. Although they are not my favorite band, you have to respect a group that are prepared to play for almost 3 hours, even if 20 minutes of that was Dave Grohl nattering to the crowd. They played all their hits (after 17 years they have had quite a few) and seemed pleased to be here. The crowd loved it and even the rain let off to let them play. I can understand why Grohl is so popular, he comes across as a sincere and decent person. In my book that is a strike against him as a rocker, but I seem to be outnumbered.

Despite the rain I had a great time at the Foo Fighters. Not enough to buy their music, but I certainly got my money’s worth.

Stuff from my Old Hard Drive

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I don’t usually keep a lot of files around. When I get a new computer I don’t tend to copy all my documents across – anything I haven’t looked at for a couple of months is probably not worth the fraction of a millimetre it takes up on the platter. On the other hand, some things I can never bring myself to delete. Here is something I rediscovered the other day:

This is one of the first MODs I wrote back on the Amiga. I never had a sampler or a very large collection of instruments, but I loved mucking around with MED trying to get a pleasant sound out of the 4 channel 8-bit sound. It is often said that there is a lot of crossover between programming and music, and the soundtracker clones of the 90s made that explicit which is possibly why I enjoyed it so much. Now days I can fire up GarageBand any time I want with any number of sampled instruments. I could say that I regret not having the time to produce music as an adult but the truth is that the inspiration isn’t there any more – my interests have moved in other directions.

Although none of my MODs ever sounded anything like as good as the music from the games and demos of the time, I am still pretty pleased with this one. It must date from form 6 (I was 16) which makes it vintage 1991. Listen to the sound of 20 years ago…

Jungle Drums MP3
Jungle Drums OGG

Book Review : House of Leaves

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House of Leaves By Mark Z. Danielewski

A young man named Johnny comes into possession of a large cache of papers written (or dictated) by a elderly, blind and recently deceased man. The papers make up a nearly complete book, and Johnny devotes his live to putting it all in order. The book the old man was writing is an analysis of a film, The Navidson Record, a documentary about the strange goings on in a family home that is much, much bigger on the inside than its exterior walls can possibly encompass.

Most of the text of House of Leaves is from the old man describing the film (which, being blind, he has never seen) and adding his ridiculously footnoted academic criticism over the top. Despite being fascinated, Johnny, as self appointed editor, feels free to add his own rather more sarcastic and down-to-earth commentary on the plot, as well as long passages documenting events in his own life. Compiling the old man’s notes is taking a toil on Johnny’s mental state, and his additions get more disjointed and alarming.

House of Leaves is a hard book to pin down. The story within a story that The Navidson Record supposedly tells is a fairly standard horror tale of a spooky house, but it is filtered through at least 3 unreliable narrators before we find out anything. Johnny points out that many of the old man’s references are completely made up, and the film possibly never existed. But Johnny himself admits to the reader that he is an expert liar and occasionally adjusts the text. The appendix is filled with “supporting documents” that obscure things every further.

The format of the book itself is worked into the story. Like the house, the interior of the book is slightly too large for the cover. During the more weird passages the flow of text breaks up as paragraphs flow at weird angles or jump across pages at speed. Parts of the text are struck out (Johnny explains that the old man deliberately blotted out some pages with ink) leaving us to guess at the contents.

Parts of the book are incredibly funny, excellently parodying dry academic criticism. The plot of The Navidson Record itself is suitably creepy. Johnny’s tale of woe is a very dated I-take-drugs-and-fuck-a-lot-of-strippers-but-I-really-don’t-enjoy-it first-person narrative that just screams 90s fiction, but the fact that he is probably lying to the reader about much of it makes it a little more interesting. If nothing else, House of Leaves adds a little mystery into what can be a very obvious genre.

Recommended, I think

Book Review – Marooned In Realtime

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Marooned In Realtime By Vernor Vinge

Sometime in the near future humanity invents the “bobble”, a device that generates a perfect stasis field, time does not pass inside at all. Totally impervious, Bobbies can be used as weapons, shielding, long-term storage, or as a one-way time machine into the future. Far into the future in an unpopulated Earth, a small collection of people who (for various reasons) have bobbled for immense amounts of time decide to collectively bobble again for 50 million years.

But one person is left behind, forcibly unable to bobble, effectively murdered as she lives out her natural life while every other living human is in stasis. 50 million years later, the others immediately realise that they have a murderer in their midst. Can old-school detective Wil Brierson crack the case?

Marooned in Realtime attempts that most tricky of feats – the hard science fiction murder mystery, and it comes pretty close to succeeding. The rules of the game (how the bobbles work, the various motivations and personal histories of the suspects, etc) are well laid out and the book never feels dull, almost an action thriller rather than a detective story.

I completely missed the clues that pointed to the murder, the solution hinges on a rather subtle point. But by that stage it didn’t matter because the story has widened in unexpected ways as the full implications of what the characters have discovered about the world and each other becomes clearer. Mystery, action, spaceships, aquatic monkeys, evolved dogs, what more do you people want?

Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Brandy in a Rifle Bottle

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They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I have always thought that you can judge a drink by its bottle. The fancier the bottle the more wretched the drink seems to be a good rule to live by.

I don’t know anything about brandy and it might be fantastic, but I am going to avoid this one:

(sorry about the picture, it is not actually that colour)

Game Review – GoatUp

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Jeff Minter, with his alter-ego/software company, Llamasoft, has been creating ungulate related games for as long as I can remember. On the Amiga games like Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels were ridiculously over the top arcade perfection, with retro (even then) graphics, lofi sound, and pixel perfect controls. GoatUp is a fine addition to Minter’s metaphorical stable (as opposed to the real stable he probably owns.)

20110927-002135.jpg

In GoatUp, you control an incredibly nimble and fertile nanny goat who must jump from platform to platform to climb an impossibly tall tower into the sky, picking up bonus items and powerups along the way. Every so often you will meet a billy goat, kissing billy goats gives you more points and also causes you to get pregnant. After a while you instantaneously give birth to a kid that follows you around, if you survive long enough you can get a long chain of offspring trailing behind you. This is useful for defeating enemies, but disturbing if you stop to think about it. Luckily, there is no time to think – you must always be climbing and the game is hard, hard, hard.

The old games lived by their control schemes and GoatUp provides several. The only one that really works well is moving via tilting left or right, and jumping with a touch. You can tell that some thought has been put into the controls, and they work much better than the tilt controls in other games. Speaking of old games, GoatUp’s graphics are deliberately designed to look like various games from the 80′s, some pretty obscure. Part of the fun is trying to remember the particular game that is being invoked.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Google+

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Why yes, I do have a Google+ account. Why do you ask?

Actually, it is no big thing any more. Google are slowly allowing more people on as they ramp up their Facebook-beating service. I have been using it for a day now, and I like a lot of what I see. Unfortunately, the rest of what I see sort of mystifies me instead.

Google+ is a Facebook-like service, where people publish Facebook-like status updates to Facebook-like lists of friends, maybe attaching a link or a photo kind of like you do in another social media website whose name has temporarily slipped my mind. Basically, it’s Facebook with a slightly more up-to-date look.

Google+’s main UI difference is the concept of circles. These allow you to easily group your contacts (friends, workmates, family, etc) with a snazzy drag-and-drop interface. Then you can pick which circles get to see each thing you post. It is a lot easier to use than Facebook’s group concept and more offers more granularity without being to complex.

It is early days yet, but there are things that Facebook still does better. Posting a link is nowhere near is easy – Facebook allows you to easily customise the summary it displays where Google+ only allows you to delete the summary, not replace it with your own. Notifications are also slow to arrive, but Google+ does display notifications in the other Google apps (gmail, reader) which is very handy.

One thing I was disappointed not to see what any way to link content from other sites into my Google+ stream. For instance, there is no way to automatically post links to new articles on this blog to my Google+ stream. Facebook sort of allows this with its Notes feature. I don’t use Twitter, but that doesn’t seem to be included either. Google has Friend Connect for following blogs, but that doesn’t seem to be integrated into Google+ at all. It is all very strange.

I haven’t tried the Hangout feature since I don’t have a webcam on my main computer, but it looks like it could be useful if it works as advertised. The Sparks feature (similar to Google news but not limited to current events) seem great, but doesn’t really need to be part of Google+. It would be better as a widget on the homepage.

Social Media only gets it’s usefulness from the number of people who use it regularly. Even if Google+ was as good as Facebook (which it may be soon), there is very little point in anyone maintaining two accounts across different services. Facebook got big because it was a grown-up MySpace, Google+ may be trying for a grown-up Facebook, but Facebook hasn’t annoyed its users like MySpace did (yet). I can’t see a mass migration from Facebook to Google+ happening soon unless Google has a few more cards up its sleeve.

New Zealand International Film Festival 2011

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The Film Festival is back in town, and this year I have promised myself to get organised and see the films that stand out. Here is my provisional list (links go to youtube trailers):

The Tree of Life
It has the whiff of Oscar-bait about it, but the trailer looks good.

Taxi Driver
“Are you looking at me? I don’t see anyone else here.” This film gets referenced in all sorts of places, and it annoys me that I have never seen it.

Nosferatu
I have seen this before, but not with an orchestra providing the music. Everybody’s favourite count munches his way across Europe, staying one step ahead of international copyright law.

Space Battleship Yamato
I have never seen the Manga this live action film is based on, but I am a sucker for bombastic alien invasion tales. For a nation that suffered greatly as a result of World War II, Japan’s films sure do reference it a lot.

The Trip
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are two of my favourite comedians, and this film looks like a flimsy excuse for them to expose on their warped world views for over an hour. Sounds fine to me.

Animation Now 2011
Every year I say that I want to see the collection of animation shorts. This year I will.

Hot Coffee
This year’s official Be-Outraged-At-Corporate-America film.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams
I am a sucker for 3D films, caves, and pictures of animals.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
A documentary about an architect.

Hobo with a Shotgun
How can you go passed a title like that? Does Rutger Hauer need the money this badly?

Troll Hunter
Vampires have been killed by Twilight, the werewolves’ moon is waning, zombies are well played out; this generation is crying out for a new monster. Between this film and The Hobbit, I am getting in on the ground floor with trolls.

Are there any I have overlooked?

Glass Microbiology

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A scale model of Phage T4 blown from transparent glassThis is Enterobacteria Phage T4. More accurately, it is an amazing glass sculpture of the Phage T4 made by a group of glass blowers in the UK that specialise in such things.

Of all human endeavours, I think glassblowing might be the one I find the most astounding. There are a whole bunch of other works in the Glass Microbiology gallery which are well worth checking out. It looks you can even buy some of the works should you want give somebody AIDS for Christmas.

State Highway Death : Turn Right for Murder

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Here is our entry for the 2011 48 Hour Film Competition:



Watch on Youtube

The reviews were not kind, but everyone had fun making it. The elements this year were a character called Bobby Young, the dialog “What have you got”, a piece of bent wire, and the film had to end on a freeze frame. Our genre was “Road Movie”, to be honest I think we ended up with more of a revenge film (one of the other genres) but I think we got in enough travel to make it count.

My contribution was mainly as the camera operation, although I helped write the original script and directed the odd scene. It is my fault that Bobby is out of focus in the last scene – hi-def video is unforgiving.