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

Edit: If anyone wants to get into my ebook archive, send an email to nicdevera at gmail dot com, I'll link you to my shared Dropbox folder.

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.