Category Archives: Books

Low tech Simstim

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I’ve been haunted by thoughts of The Peripheral. (The impending arrival of WG’s new book I suppose) A low-tech hack occurs to me, reminiscent the Simstim from Gibson’s earlier work.

At designated times a host avatar (someone famous or just someone really interesting) puts on their Simstim goggles and goes about their normal day. Or an abnormal day, if they prefer. This is where the ‘talent’ would come in.

Simultaneously, I put on my goggles (and get comfortable), seeing and hearing everything you see and hear. You might provide a little narration where appropriate. Some “avatars” would be better at this (the narration) than others. I might like to hear everything Eddie Murphy (for example) might care to say.

An optional feature: I could text you things to say. For example, if you’re stalling down Broadway in Manhattan, I might have you go up to a native and say, “Can you tell me how to get to the Statue of Liberty or should I just go fuck myself?”

I’m a little surprised this isn’t already a thing. Out of work comedians could charge by the hour. (Something like this is already happening on YouTube, isn’t it?) Struggling art historians could give tours of the Louvre or The Museum of Modern Art.

The “best” of these could be recorded and experienced at reduced prices. Maybe even “George Carlin’s Greatest Hits” compilations. If George were still alive.

These wouldn’t have to be funny/famous people. I’m thinking of a trail guide in Montana or a white water rafter in the Grand Canyon. No narration, thank you.

New Yorker profile of William Gibson

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William Gibson is far and away my favorite science fiction author. At last count there are fifty articles and interviews linked here at smays.com. This one in the New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, might be the “best” yet (whatever that means). Like all New Yorker articles, it’s long by today’s standards. I’ve pulled a few excerpts at random.

It was a depressing read for me. In the Gibsonian apocalypse “the end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

As the Internet became more accessible, Gibson discovered that he wasn’t terribly interested in spending time online himself. He was fascinated, though, by the people who did. They seemed to grow hungrier for the Web the more of it they consumed. It wasn’t just the Internet; his friends seemed to be paying more attention to media in general. When new television shows premièred, they actually cared.

The advent of the online world, he thought, was changing the physical one. In the past, going online had felt like visiting somewhere else. Now being online was the default: it was our Here, while those awkward “no service” zones of disconnectivity had become our There. […] It didn’t matter where you were in the landscape; you were in the same place in the datascape. It was as though cyberspace were turning inside out, or “everting”—consuming the world that had once surrounded it.

“What I find most unsettling,” Gibson said, “is that the few times that I’ve tried to imagine what the mood is going to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, magical good luck, and Brexit and Trump and the rest turn out as well as they possibly can, the climate will still be happening. And as its intensity and steadiness are demonstrated, and further demonstrated—I try to imagine the mood, and my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to come to terms with it, personally. And I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t be able to.”

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

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“Homicide: Life on the Street is an American police procedural television series chronicling the work of a fictional version of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit. It ran for seven seasons (122 episodes) on NBC from January 31, 1993 to May 21, 1999, and was succeeded by Homicide: The Movie (2000), which served as the de facto series finale.” (Wikipedia)

I only recently learned the series was based on David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991). Many of the characters and stories used throughout the show were based on events depicted in the book. The book was also the inspiration for the HBO series The Wire.

I just finished the book and it was as good as you would expect. Words like “gritty” and “raw” don’t begin to capture the characters, locales and dialogue. I recently purchased the DVD set of the NBC series. I watched the series when it aired but that was a long time ago and I’m sure I missed a lot of episodes.

Simon also wrote The Corner, a six-part HBO series that chronicled the life of a family living in poverty amid the open-air drug markets of West Baltimore. After I recover from Homicide, I’ll read The Corner. My recollection of the HBO series is of a very depressing story.

Most police dramas that make it to TV or cable are pretty week compared to Simon’s work. NYPD Blue was good but limited by being on network TV. If you enjoyed The Wire and Homicide, I highly recommend the books on which they were based.

The Emperor’s New Mind

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“According to quantum mechanics, any two electrons must necessarily be completely identical. […] This is not merely to say that there is now way of telling the particles apart: the statement is considerably stronger than that. If an electron in a person’s brain were to be exchanged with an electron in a brick, then the state of the system would be exactly the same state as it was before, not merely indistinguishable from it! […] What distinguishes the person from his house is the pattern of how his constituents are arranged, not the individuality of the constituents themselves.”

—The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose

Viruses

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“Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself.” — Snow Crash

I’m stuck on the role of FB and Twitter as virus vectors. How naive of us to think the worst parts of humanity — racism and white supremacy — would not spread more rapidly than our better natures.

BBC: His Dark Materials

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“The BBC has released a brief teaser for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, giving us a first look at the series and its characters. The BBC greenlit the show for an eight-episode season back in 2015, and ordered a second season last fall. The series is set in an alternate world in which people are accompanied by manifestations of their souls, shapeshifting animals called daemons. In the first novel, The Golden Compass, a girl named Lyra Belacqua (played by Logan star Dafne Keen) travels to the arctic to search for a friend who has been kidnapped. There, she discovers that a major church has been studying a phenomenon called Dust, an elementary particle that imparts consciousness in humans, something that the organization deems heretical.”

The franchise virus

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“The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.”

— Snow Crash

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book but discover something new each time I pick it up. I like Stephenson’s female characters. Always smart and strong. Y.T. the skateboard courier in Snow Crash; Eliza in The Baroque Cycle; and Zula in REAMDE.

Same goes for William Gibson: Molly Millions (Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive); Angie Mitchell (Count Zero); Chevette Washington (Virtual Light and All Tomorrow’s Parties); Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition); Hollis Henry (Spook Country and Zero History); and Flynne Fisher (The Peripheral).

Sit Down and Shut Up

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Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, God, Truth, Sex, Death, & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye

Amazon: “In Sit Down and Shut Up, Brad Warner tackles one of the great works of Zen literature, the Shobogenzo by 13th-century Zen master Dogen. Illuminating Dogen’s enigmatic teachings in plain language, Warner intertwines sharp philosophical musings on sex, evil, anger, meditation, enlightenment, death, God, sin, and happiness with an exploration of the power and pain of the punk rock ethos.”

This book got a lot of my highlighter. A few examples below:

“There are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it.”

“Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing.”

“Thoughts are nothing more than electrical activity, changes in the organic chemistry of the brain.”

“Words cannot capture what your life really is. […] All humankind’s problems today stem solely from our inability to see that words are just words.”

“Everything you ever do is always, always, always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

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“Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It’s the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.” (Amazon)

I’ve been creeping in this direction for a while. Never on FB; deleted my Twitter account back in 2016; and said goodbye to Google+ last year. But my world is still noisier than I’d like and I got some good ideas from this book. Here’s a few excerpts:

“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. The App Store wants your soul.”
“Checking your “likes” is the new smoking.” — Bill Maher

“(Smart phones are) slot machines in our pockets.”

“What’s the single biggest factor shaping our lives today?” (Our screens)

“We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.”

“The iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.”

“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”

“A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.”

“Assuming that you use Facebook, list the most important things it provides you—the particular activities that you would really miss if you were forced to stop using the service altogether. Now imagine that Facebook started charging you by the minute. How much time would you really need to spend in the typical week to keep up with your list of important Facebook activities?”