Window display

Along Gil Puyat Avenue.

Just finished downloading a Heavy Metal torrent archive, 1977-2012. I haven't been keeping up the last few years, mostly because now it's so easy to get free content off the web, but I used to be a big fan. Going through the back issues reminds me of how HM shaped my dreams, let me escape the humdrum world and go somewhere more interesting in my imagination.

Upstream Color

I loved Primer, so I'd been waiting for Shane Carruth's next movie. Initially I was turned off because reviews compared it to Terence Malick's Tree of Life, which I despised. But compared to Malick's sentimentality, Upstream Color's more cognitive, a puzzle of a movie.

My theory is the foley-sampling pig farmer is God, the con man is the Devil, and they work together, like in the Book of Job. Kris's story arc parallels Eve.

Surprise, snip snip

Left to right, Toni (spay) and Misa (neuter) scheduled for surgery at PAWS. Let's go to the vet, guys, it'll be fun! *coughaprilfools*

SSS building roof heart

Computer mouse is too mainstream

Get your KittenClicker today!

Samurai creed

I have no parents; I make the heaven and earth my mother and father.
I have no home; I make awareness my dwelling.
I have no life and death; I make the tides of breathing my life and death.
I have no divine power; I make honesty my divine power.
I have no means; I make understanding my means.
I have no magic secrets; I make character my magic secret.
I have no body; I make endurance my body.
I have no eyes; I make the flash of lightning my eyes.
I have no ears; I make sensibility my ears.
I have no limbs; I make promptness my limbs.
I have no strategy; I make “unshadowed by thought” my strategy
I have no designs; I make “seizing opportunity by the forelock” my design.
I have no miracles; I make right action my miracle.
I have no principles; I make adaptability to all circumstances my principles.
I have no tactics; I make emptiness and fullness my tactics.
I have no talents; I make ready wit my talent.
I have no friends; I make my mind my friend.
I have no enemy; I make carelessness my enemy.
I have no armor; I make benevolence and righteousness my armor.
I have no castle; I make immovable mind my castle.
I have no sword; I make absence of self my sword.

via ancientworlds.net

I first read a version of those words in a martial arts book, back when I was a young weeaboo, and the bleak reiterating format is striking. Later around high school I saw it again in Eric Lustbader's The Miko. I didn't know what to call it, I remembered the first lines as:

I have no parents; I make the earth and sky my parents
I have no home; in the depths of my soul I make my home

Googling around, apparently it's called the "samurai creed," with several slightly different wordings extant on the web, original author unknown, from the 14th century. There's no Wikipedia page for the samurai creed, but maybe there should be; Robert Pinsky's Samurai Song riffs on the theme, and it is eminently riffable.

Layer Cake

You're born, you take shit. Get out in the world, you take more shit. Climb a little higher, take less shit. Til one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere, and you've forgotten what shit even looks like.

Spoiler, the message is undercut further on, at the ending. The moral being that linear progressions aren't set in stone, even crimelords are vulnerable to randomness.

But I think about that scene sometimes, and how my work choices haven't necessarily been about more money, but less bullshit.

Sanlakas protest

At the DILG on EDSA.

Boomerang?

Kinda busy arranging for the next work gig, and taking care of the kitten. Was thinking of scaling back, maybe 2 to 3 posts a week, weekends off. More time to write longer, try to hold to a minimum wordcount or something. Have a picture.

Kitten

Your argument is invalid.

Burbleburble

Bleah. Here's a pic.

Al's birthday thing, Jan 19. I need more blood sugar. Or maybe I'll try sweating through 48 hours of cold-turkey no-coffee again.

Chimamanda Adichie TED talk, the danger of a single story

I too grew up reading Western books. I've occasionally used baseball metaphors even though I've never played baseball. And I despise Filipino literature, it's all barrios and Spanish architecture. Well, Nick Joaquin's ok, I liked Leon Ma Guerrero's translation of Noli Me Tangere. But literature should be an escape from provincialism, not a retreat. Growing up, I wondered what lembas tasted like. I went as far away from provincialism as possible, to philosophy and science fiction.

So that is how to create a single story: show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

Adichie overestimates the power of media, underestimates human stupidity. Even when there are multitudes of different stories presenting different perspectives and facets, like on the internet, with Google and Wikipedia and armies of bloggers on either side of everything, many people just hear the story they want and shear away complexity, nuance, context.

The single story happens in people's heads, it's intellectual laziness. So yes, Adichie's roomate was a terrible person for making assumptions about what Africans must be like. Any group, Americans, Palestinians, blacks, Eskimos, gays, Aztecs, whatever: some are stupid, some are smart, some are heroes, some are bastards, etc. This should be blindingly obvious to anyone by the time they're a teenager. Stereotyping, thinking any group is a monolith that thinks with one mind, speaks with one voice, is immediately stupid, no research or travel required.

Random reading

Finally tracked down a copy of John M. Ford's The Final Reflection. Not finished yet, but kinda disappointing, after all the hype I've been hearing about it. Spoiler, the sensei grandmaster of the game dies fairly early on, there's almost none of the bildungsroman mentoring I was expecting. (Same reason I was disappointed with Meet Joe Black.)

I've now gone through about 70% of the Questionable Content archive. Not straight through, jumping around a bit, with some navigation form the QC wiki. Yelling Bird's twitterstream (NSFW) is hilarious. A masochistic part of me thinks it would be cool to have Yelling Bird and GLaDOS voiceovers insult-narrating my life.

The battle for geek culture continues

Came across the Portlandia Nerd PSA video on Youtube:

First I think, ehh, this crap again. A while back, Joe Peacock wrote Booth babes need not apply, prompting John Scalzi to post Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be. And there's the bizarre battle over "Fake Geek Girls."

Mostly I agree with Scalzi, and Penny Arcade said it well: there is no gate, you're not the gatekeeper. And yet, there's something there worth parsing to get to. Here's Maddox's blistering rant on You're not a nerd, geeks aren't sexy and you don't "fucking love" science.

Again, as a general strategy it's often helpful to get used to thinking of things in terms of fuzzy sets and points on a spectrum, in this case ranging from very geeky/nerdy, to medium, to mainstream, to- well, the opposite of geeky/nerdy is stupid, mindless, lazy, sloppy.

If some trendroid wants to wear an Avengers shirt, fine. More money for a good franchise, Joss Whedon can do more cool stuff. What pisses some geeks off is outsiders appropriating the surface appearance without understanding the underlying depth, and that's not a dilemma unique to geekdom, it's a common, near-universal thing in all fields. This isn't a gender thing, or a geek thing, there are posers, posers everywhere.

What I empathize with is the hardcore obsessive's disdain and contempt for the dilettante. But not for the beginner! If you love what I love, I'll give you my books, babble on incessantly, subsidize your descent into addiction to the thing we love, you are my brother. What's frustrating is the dabblers who will forever just skate on the surface and never go any deeper.

PS, as with most things, self-selection is weak evidence; if you call yourself a geek, well, talk is cheap. When other people call you a geek, then that's the real nomination.

Free will and neuroscience

From Ted Chiang's  short story "What's Expected of Us:"

By now you’ve probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you’re reading this. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game, one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that you can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed. If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press. There’s no way to fool a Predictor.

There's a goofy explanation, every Predictor is a micro time machine that reverses causality or something. The punchline is that this proves once and for all that free will is an illusion. The meta-punchline is that you don't need time travel, just neuroscience. We have similar results already, Benjamin Libet's landmark experiments established that there's a detectable readiness potential before an action.

We'll probably have something similar to Predictors in the near future. It's worth meditating on, take Chiang Predictors out of the mental category of "science fiction/never gonna happen," and imagine they're real, because they will be soon. Try and get ahead of the curve, think about the implications. Our conscious selves are the ghosts in the machine, like cloistered bosses who find out after things are already decided.

Adventure Time ;_;

Saw this comic on knowyourmeme, image-searched to find the original, it's "A Distant Memory" by Matsu-sensei. Part 1, Part 2 on deviantart. Breaks the feels meter, this should be canon.

Amazing, I love her husky voice. Now I need to find Pitch Perfect. Did due diligence, listened to Anna Kendrick, Lulu and the Lampshades, Mainers Mountaineers, but Anna Burden really nails it as an acapella solo.

Reddit's pretty cool. Found The Oatmeal's amazing post about their house burning down. Man, I can relate, been there myself. Lost a cat too. :(

Reminded me of Hyperbole and a Half, pinged the blog, still quiet. Thought maybe Allie's still prepping for her book launch, but then found the Reddit thread where Allie talks about her continuing struggle with depression.

Got nothing to post, and here I am posting it. The Notepad++ site hadn't been working for a while, but finally got that downloaded and working. Then decided I didn't like it, went looking for some other lightweight text editor with a word count function. So yeah, there's gedit for Windows. ("The Easy Way: Step 1 and done. The Cool Way: Step 1... code code code... Step 25..." are you fucken kidding me?)

Thought I'd try signing up at Reddit, click register, tried username "nicdevera," bzzt, try another. Motherf... No wait, that's me, I signed that up a while back but haven't used it. Reset password, and I'm in. Looking around.

Nate Silver's as gay as he wants to be

Ron de Vera's "On Gay Labels and Gay Memories." He's my cousin, let's say my respect is taken as read. But I think this is the wrong move for The Cause.

Guy Branum's "Yes, Nate Silver, You Are a Gay Statistician." Flawed on the face of it, and the commentariat doesn't disappoint. From BlkAth3st:

What disturbs me is that people within the LGBTQ community feel as if the LGBTQ community is some vestige of happiness and inclusion, when in fact we are quite the opposite. Nate Silver has the right to identify as sexually gay, but may have no connection whatsoever to the LGBTQ "community." Some people feel comfortable with having their identity determined by their class, gender, race, or sexual identity and others just want to be human, which is the position I think Mr. Silver has taken. Irregardless of his position, I think it is important to understand that for a community who is constantly seeking acceptance and inclusion from the heterosexual world, that we not recreate and perpetuate some of the very ideologies of heterosexism that we ourselves attempt to escape- such as defining a persons identity because of their behavior.

 Brian In Philly:

The premise of the article is that Nate has a Sacred Duty to be a self-sacrificing activist for our collective benefit -- something I don't really buy.

I think most of us want to be known as the brilliant researcher, hardworking teacher, awesome mechanic, or great neighbor... who happens to be gay. The minute I start getting pegged as "the gay fill-in-the-blank," I push back, because guess what -- I'm me.

I'm not representative of everyone else. I've got an aspect of myself that is identifying. Some will hold it against me (to their ultimate detriment). But Nate, and me, and everyone else, is so much more than "the gay fill-in-the-blank." 

 There's a lot more good stuff in the comments, where Guy Branum's thoroughly taken to task. The gist of the article is that gays need to speak up because unlike race, homosexuality is (often) not readily identifiable, so the default cultural presumption is that you're straight. That last part is where it goes off the rails. No it's not right to presume someone is straight, this is where real progress is currently being made, and IMO this is is where we should be directing our efforts.

A few weeks ago we were watching Cloud Atlas, and we're introduced to Robert Frobisher, in bed with another man. Later Frobisher is shown seducing his boss's wife, and the person I was with said "But I thought he was gay?!" My point is, I made no such assumption. And I never do.

I suspect this is the growing trend, moreover that this is How Things Should Be. Anyone who's watched a lot of anime knows not to make assumptions on gender or sexual orientation, likewise for fans of the better kinds of science fiction. (I've been thinking that "Bonobo Utopia" would be a good title for a post on how bisexuality is the default assumption in a lot of Utopian fiction).

I read Silver's The Signal and the Noise last month, didn't know or care about his orientation, found out he was gay on the Wikipedia page about him a week later. I started reading Clive Barker back in high school, found out he was gay only about 3 years ago, which changed nothing at all about how I think of him or his books.

Back to On Gay Labels and Gay Memories:

 However, I will keep calling myself a gay writer. If I wear a rainbow shirt and use a fluffy pen when writing about gay characters, it would be of little to no consequence. What matters is that I am a passionate writer who also happens to be proud of his sexual orientation. And if I become successful, I would prefer to be remembered as a successful gay writer and not simply a successful writer. Perhaps, when the time comes, I would figure out how I can be a gay freethinker, a gay photographer, or a gay teacher. For now, I am happy being a gay writer.

Such self-pigeonholing seems an almost appalling waste of talent. I'm an atheist, a group recently polling as more reviled than gays or Muslims. Of course this isn't "my group's more oppressed than yours," but I've never thought of myself as an atheist writer, or any kind of X-ist writer/blogger/person/etc.

I have a dream. That someday, there will be openly gay characters on Cartoon Network, Sesame Street, and the Muppets. (Heck, the Muppets would probably be first.) The road to that isn't with gay characters, but with characters who also just happen to be gay.

Phoning it in: photos

One post every day, they're not all gonna be quality. Next post will be longer.

Skyfall

Great movie, my favorite Bond film after Casino Royale. But it occurs to me that Silva hacked MI6 three times. First, the gas explosion, then MI6 is understandably spooked, they relocate operations to the underground bunker. Presumably at this point the incumbent Q is fired or retired, and Ben Whishaw's Q is promoted to head tech and hacker in residence. Later, Silva reads off Bond's performance evaluations and psych report. Those evaluations were post-explosion, so Silva's already cut into the bunker's systems. After the island sequence, Bond tells MI6 that their network security got rogered yet again, they change passwords or whatever, then Silva's laptop Trojan pulls their pants down one more time.

John C. Wright

I'm 7 chapters into John C. Wright's The Golden Age, and I'm surprised at how... amazingly good it is. I first heard of Wright when David Brin pwned Wright's Luddite foolishness. Later, wandering around, I read about Wright's apparently famous anti-gay blog post, which he soon deleted. But here's Hal Duncan's epic curb stomp on Wright, still high up on the Google search results.

I want to believe that this guy is an asshat. And certainly there's asshattery here: "If Vulcans had a church, they'd be Catholics." Really, Wright? Seriously? To add to Wright's sins, he even panned Ted Chiang's brilliant "Stories of Your Life and Others."

But it's the tale, not he who tells it. Obvious example, Lovecraft was a racist, and while not a Lovecraft fan, I respect the mythos.

EDIT: In the comments below, John C. Wright (seems legit) bizarrely claims David Brin was making it all up. So here's the link to Wright's Luddite blog post.

In Paul Di Filippo's Ribofunk, there's a short story where two kids down neuropharms for chemically induced satori:

The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of
meditating monks: in the case of Jinx's drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama
himself. In a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I
felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mattered, but everything
counted. All my problems were non-existent.

 "Nothing mattered, but everything counted," that's the smartest, Zennest thing I've read in a long time. Still savoring it.

Mindfulness hack

The Pomodoro Technique is a popular productivity hack, but looking into it, I hated how arbitrary the basic idea was. So 25 minutes of uninterrupted focus, why 25? Because the inventor's kitchen timer had 25 minutes on it. But why not 15 minutes, or 30? Haven't there been any studies on optimal timeframes or upper limits for concentration and flow?

So, I've read a lot of praise for Vipassana and mindfulness meditation, but I hate sitting still and not doing anything. Cutting through to the science, it's really all about metacognition and antisphexishness.

Another piece of the puzzle, I've always preferred wristwatches with an hour chime, it's a good way to knock yourself out of zombie mode and bring you back to the present: beep, it's X o'clock, what am I doing? But wristwatch chimes are never very loud, so they only work in quiet environments. But this is the 21st century, surely there are other options. And yes, there are apps for that. Caynax Hour Chime can set alarms not just for the hour, but also 15, 30, and 45 minutes past. I imagined 15-minute chunks of focused work alternating with 15 minute breaks.

After about a week of this, 15 minutes is too short. I chose a particularly piercing, high-pitched chime, but it happens so frequently that I still often tune it out. So upon consideration, maybe 20-minute chunks would work better: chime at top of the hour, 20, and 40 minutes past. And so far there's no app for that.

How to waste a life: one day at a time. Don't wanna do year in review. Looking forward, use the New Year momentum. I'm gonna try daily blogging, no matter what, deadline midnight every day, try and get started around 1800.

Fantasy versus science fiction thoughts again

China Mieville talk at Kentucky University on science fiction. I dutifully sat through all 7 parts on Youtube, listened intently with my earphones on, scribbled down notes on a steno pad, scoffing intermittently. "Autotelic hegemonising ideology" and so on. Pretty words.

Remember why you dropped out of engineering school and decided you had a call for the ministry? Comparative religion, homiletics, higher criticism, apologetics, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, all require scholarship... but the slipstick subjects require brains.

-Robert Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice

 Thought of doing a careful point-by-point refutation, but ehh. At around the same time that the Mieville talk came through the feeds, I got this video from PHD Comics on "The Fingerprints of Stars."

Mieville's a scholar of sf and fantasy criticism; what about the famous "sense of wonder?" What about "Big Dumb Objects?" Consider the stars, indeed. There they are, in every way, on every level, bigger and more awesome than all of fantasy put together; oliphaunts, fastitocalons, Dark Lords, Elder Gods, and all the rest.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

Of course the thing about the endless debate on sf and fantasy is that they're fuzzy sets: hard sf (Greg Egan, Peter Watts, etc) is the conceptual anchor, the core whose gravitic pull defines sf, and distantly influences the science fantasy middle ground (Star Wars, John Carter, etc). A good heuristic is that fantasy is system 1, or default mode, where feelings are primary tools of judgement, and evil is defined by a sense of wrongness. While (hard) sf is system 2, or task positive, requires cognitive effort to keep up.

Quay things at the Esplanade, I thought they looked like Totoro.

Pic of girls taking pics of food. Achievement unlocked: meta-hipster.

Singapore

Been busy, got here a few days ago. It's been interesting, and odd.

Your shoe size can tell your age and how mathdumb you are

I. Input shoe size
II. blah
III. blah
IV. blah
V. blah (Arbitrary number that makes this work, but only for the year 2012)
VI. Input age

Output is your shoe size and age. If you input someone else's values, it outputs their values right back. Magic!

Too Many Secrets

David Brin's The Transparent Society is an important book, and a fascinating read. Brin called it, he saw what's coming and wrote about how we should start figuring this out, because "light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives."

Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty occasionally veers into silliness, but there are some valuable gems:

The process of demythologizing yourself is begun by
bragging about all the things which, in your false modesty,
you were pretending you didn't care about. You have to go
through your vanity and the suffering associated with it. You
have to show off and be embarrassed, both of which are
egotism, and you can't skip, dodge, or get around this step.
You have to praise yourself openly rather than manipulate to
suck praise. You have to acknowledge being a secret hero to
yourself and confess the putrid vanity of all of your usual
phony self-denigration.

"Putrid vanity" is a wonderfully Zen Buddhist kind of phrase.

Radical Honesty + sousveillance is tempting, appeals to some part of me. Post pictures of my dirty laundry, of the dog poop, of the mess in the kitchen. But it's ultimately a wrong impulse.

Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest-that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he'd identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent-with tricks like free association-and then declared the product of all that remained to be "honest." --Greg Egan, Axiomatic

I'm puzzled how cog psych people like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely are willing to concede so much to system 1, as if that were our true nature. Heuristics are important of course, but system 2, as our higher aspirations, is the self that really counts.

Finally, not that it'll make much difference, but I'd like to publicly declare that I'm operating under Crocker's Rules. Have been for years. People still won't use it, but there it is.

Alan Glynn's The Dark Fields is a terrible, annoying book, a non-technical liberal arts guy's misconceptions about what superhuman intelligence might be like. The movie version Limitless is better.

Watched The Count of Monte Cristo 2002 film. The thing about reading is you learn to see connections, webs, going back to the source texts; like how legions of fantasy books are descended mostly from Tolkien, some from Mervyn Peake, or H.P. Lovecraft.

Generally, tracing nodes in Pratchettian L-space goes backwards. I'd seen the very odd anime Gankutsuou:


I'd seen V for Vendetta. I'd loved Alfred Bester's novel The Stars My Destination (in my head I saw Colin Farrell as Gully Foyle) I saw how Bruce Wayne's rich playboy's persona takes elements from the Count's facade.

View from MRT Cubao Station

Browsing through Alan Moore's From Hell, looked up Ripper-related stuff on the net, came across the Wiki article on Robert Liston, this made me laugh:

Amputated the leg in under 2¹⁄₂ minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene, they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene, they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he dropped dead from fright.
That was the only operation in history with a 300 percent mortality.

Planners > shooters

Re-watched the Jason Bourne trilogy yesterday. In the first one, Bourne's boss says "You're a malfunctioning $30 million weapon!" And dang, 30 mill is way too much to produce someone with Bourne's skillset.

Secret assassin training programs abound in fiction, and of course it's fiction, but the lack of versimilitude, the wrongness, just shows how badly people misunderstand what humanity is, much less how we could go about building better, more effective humans. 30 million would be a bargain for something like the NZT in Limitless.

Cybercrime Act, another move against free speech

Article 3, section 4 of the Philippine Constitution says "No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peacably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances."

Way back in grade school, I looked up the bill of rights in my grandfather's law library and found that passage. Reading it was electrifying. Free speech is protected, wow. I memorized the words, doodled it in my notebooks.

Republic Act No. 10175, the Cybercrime Prevention Act is getting a lot of attention on Facebook now, especially this:

(4) Libel. — The unlawful or prohibited acts of libel as defined in Article 355 of the Revised Penal Code, as amended, committed through a computer system or any other similar means which may be devised in the future.

So slagging someone online is technically illegal, the internet hordes are up in arms. But like a lot things in the Cybercrime Act, it's a reiteration of stuff that's already illegal, like forgery etc, plus computers. And as Wikipedia puts it "A notable characteristic of these crimes under Philippine law is the specification that they apply to imputations both real and imaginary." Facts count as libel! And the libel law was always like that, even before the internet! Why is this odious libel law still on the books? Whether online, in print, or carved on freaking stone tablets, free speech should rule.

xkcd's Password strength? Iffy

xkcd password generator

The xkcd comic on password strength is wrong about one thing: it may seem easy to remember 4 random words, but it's trickier in practice. I got two-factor authentication setup on my Google logins, but Facebook Philippines still doesn't have two-factor auth, so I did the 4-word bit. Coming back to it now to check recall, I knew the 4 words but couldn't remember in what order they went in. Had to look it up in Firefox's saved passwords.

Looking at 4 randomly generated words can be beguiling though, like story prompts, like Tarot.

Ayn Rand's Lord of the Rings.

Last week I re-watched Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's one scene in particular in the extended cut that I wish had made it to the theatrical release, where Faramir soliloquizes on a dead Haradrim mook:



It goes a long way towards ameliorating the pervasive racism of Tolkien's story. What of Harad, what of Rhun? They're the bad guys. All of them? Apparently.

Which is why Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer impressed me so much. It's a pastiche of sorts, a revisionist history. LotR was the propaganda of the victors, demonizing the steppe-nomadic Orocuen and nascent industrial Mordor's Age of Reason.

I should do a post on Ayn Rand sometime.

Reality Hunger misses the point

A few days ago I saw Reality Hunger: A Manifesto on a bookstore shelf, and I thought, wow yeah, that sounds good. Reality, I'm on board with that. Who wouldn't be?

So I downloaded the book off the internet. As some astute Goodreads comments remark, the author David Shields should have just posted or blogged this manifesto online, readable for free.

Reality Hunger is a waste of time, a ripoff "collage" collection of quotes, passages, and aphorisms, mostly from other writers. But I want to try and salvage the idea, the title.

"There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is."
- Greg Egan 

Generally, reading fiction to gain insight on life is like watching Tron to learn about computers. 

I thought Reality Hunger would be about reality-based writing. I thought it would be about posting, blogging, tweeting. The bastard offspring of gonzo journalism and cyberpunk, as practiced by William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson. Or even Spider Jerusalem. Note how Gibson's gradually shifted from writing about the Blade Runner Future to writing about the world post-9/11.

Isn't this world enough?

Wikipedia banned my IP address as an open proxy? I"m using the wifi coming off the PAFID office router, and as far as I know there's no anonymizing shenanigans setup. Tried whatismyipaddress.com,
[IP redacted] is just a regular network device in the Philippines.

Online bootleg ebook resources

In descending order:

BookFinder
Libgen Online Library
Mobilism
The Pirate Bay

Fredric Brown's "Imagine"

Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.

Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea

Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.

Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, familiars, demons.

Easy to imagine all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.

Imagine spaceships and the future.

Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there'll be spaceships in it.

Is there then anything that's really hard to imagine?

Of course there is.

Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself, aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you're in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.

Imagine a universe - infinite or not, as you wish to picture it - with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.

Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.

Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.

Imagine!

Statistically Improbable Phrases

Apparently defunct; seems Amazon doesn't display these anymore. But I collected a few a while back, they seemed so wonderfully evocative of the primes of the story.

William Gibson's Neuromancer: simstim switch, toxin sacs, new pancreas, leather jeans, goddam thing.

Iain M. Banks's The Algebraist: spectating fleet, remote delving, old dweller, wormhole portal, wormhole network, diamond bubble, needle ship, little dweller, galactic community, diamond leaf, drive signatures, signal skin, failed assassin, war craft, drop ship, formal war, command space, access tube, dark ships, cloud tops.

Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: total perspective vortex, pikka bird, central mission module, jynnan tonnyx, stomping throb, supernova bomb, intergalactic cruise, new hyperspace bypass, white robots, large friendly letters, herring sandwich, galactic sector, supervising program, security robot, battle machine.

Frank Herbert's Dune: stillsuit manufacturer, panoplia propheticus, colonel bashar, gom jabbar, inkvine scar, ducal signet, factory crawler, poison snooper, voice from the outer world, stillsuit hood, weirding way, dew collectors, diamond tattoo, little makers, maker hooks, message cylinder, water flagon, funeral plain, death commandos, spice liquor, palm lock, prison planet, shield belt, terrible purpose, demanding memory.

Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs: oubliette room, food carrier, hockey mask, jack handle.

Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination: gutter tongue, sunward course, tool locker, burning man, tattooed face.

John Crowley's Little Big: folding bedroom, old orrery, imaginary study, alligator purse, guardian trees, tall bed, single eyebrow.

Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land: honey bun, seventh circle, grok people, stereo tank, babble box, bounce tube, posing show, water brother, naughty picture, water ceremony.

Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: lock thirteen, catapult head, ballistic radars, executive cell, new catapult, laser drills, grain barges, parking orbit, other warrens, new chum.

Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons: crew lounge, open cluster, knife missile, ship drone, plasma rifle, combat suit, old raincoat.

Stepen King's The Gunslinger: high speech, gunslinger nodded.

Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain: scooter factory, scooter races, retina print, other sleepless, work terminal, lucid dreaming.

Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers: regimental commander, boot chevrons, fleet sergeant, cap trooper, bulkhead thirty, assistant section leader, hand flamer, powered armor, combat drop, drop room, platoon sergeant.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game: dragon army, little doctor, bugger ships, bugger fleet, bugger wars, flash suit, battle school, toon leaders, null gravity, simulator field, frozen soldier, launch group, green green brown.

M. John Harrison's Viriconium: proton circuit, reborn man, pleasure canal, young queen, pastel towers, reborn men, nameless sword, plague zone, scarlet armour, power knife, energy cannon, false windows.

Richard Adams's Watership Down: evening silflay, chewing pellets, great burrow, beech hanger, lame rabbit, strange rabbit, hutch rabbits, elder bloom, shining wire, white blindness, other rabbits, earth pile.

T.H. White's The Once and Future King: pele tower, traitor knight, kitchen page, best knight, seventh sense.

Charles Stross's Accelerando: biophysics model, entity signifier, dumb matter, utility fog, pocket universe, wicker man, router network, simulation space, glances round, light sail, snaps her fingers, inner system.

Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix: launch ring, circumsolar space, corporate republic, feeble gravity, land panels, heavy gravity, diplomatic bag, plastic eyes.

Greg Bear's Eon: sixth chamber machinery, third chamber library, third chamber city, seventh chamber, flaw passage, geometry stacks, zero elevator, social roster, plasma tube, assigned ghost, fourth chamber, plasma front, gate opener, traction fields, southern cap, zero bridge, green badge, northern cap, mechanical workers, science team, first chamber, bore hole.

William Gibson's Idoru: human nervous tissue, black cups, pink bed, love hotel, video units.

Online music in the Philippines

Rdio: Not available in your country.
Spotify: Not available in your country.
Pandora: Not available in your country.
Google Music: Not available in your country.

What does work: Grooveshark, Last.fm, and Libre.fm.

Beatable, sure, I could make it look like I'm connecting from the USA, but meh. Again, not an audiophile, not worth the hassle. What I'm looking for is just music recommendations, like I input AC/DC, Bob Dylan, Yoshida Brothers, Fall Out Boy, etc, and the site suggests more music I might like.

Patrick Farley's a genius. His Spiders is great post-cyberpunk, but my favorite is The Guy I Almost Was. Paleofuturism and proto-hipsterdom.

A few years ago I had 2 gigs of music; now I have 11 gigs, way too much. I'm no audiophile, and never will be; still haven't listened to a lot of this stuff. Today I learned that in their early years the Goo Goo Dolls did loud, fast, punk metal stuff, bleah.

Tick tock

Power's out at the house. Camping at SM foodcourt, shuffling data, backing up to external drive, updating music and ebooks on my phone. Happy birthday. 32, I've rolled off the calendar. Getting too damn old for this. Need to get out.

Watching Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society. 3 movies and 2 series later, the animated GitS world still rehashes bits from Masamune Shirow's first volume. The original Ghost in the Shell manga is a landmark in cyberpunk for eyeball-kick density, ranking with the best of William Gibson or Bruce Sterling.