Dangling Conversations

Posted 18 Jan, 2009 at 20:30 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

Every now and then I'll pick up a series that I really liked when I was in high school. I should remember to stop doing that, because I'm almost always happier with the memories than the experience.

Right now I'm going through Jack Chalker's Quintara Marathon trilogy. There's a lot of things that I recall liking about Chalker when I was reading his stuff as a teenager: his use of diverse cultural and mythological elements, his ways of talking about technology, his depictions of different worlds. Neat ideas, neat plots, neat settings; these things make for decent space opera.

But the writing! His characters in this particular series have backgrounds that shift as the books go on, often flatly contradicting facts established at the very beginning. There's a lot of telling not showing as far as character traits go, and the way the story is set up means that there's a lot of decisions and discoveries that are repeated multiple times among multiple groups of characters... and it's not that interesting to read the third description of a tesseract in fifty pages, really.

What this probably means is that I need new, better fiction in my life; my recent spate of library borrowings have been almost entirely non-fiction, the lone exception being Patricia McKillip's lovely The Bell at Seeley Head. Suggestions, oh possibly imaginary readers?

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Posted 16 Jan, 2009 at 20:31 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Procol Harum's Conquistador, especially as performed with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, is perhaps the finest flowering of progressive rock.

That is all.

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Posted 27 Sep, 2006 at 23:26 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

So consider this a resolution to put up at least one post a month in this space. Here's some stuff I've been listening to a lot recently.

• Le Vent du Nord consists of four veterans of the traditional Quebecois folk-music scene. There's a fairly strong similarity with the maritime-celtic sound that became a Big Deal back ten years ago. I'm about 98.8% sure that these guys would be awesome in concert.
• Every now and then I rediscover music in my collection that I haven't thought about for a while, and the most recent rediscovery is the Concrete Blonde back-catalogue. Fine stuff.
• Kael's recently got me listening to the Killers' first album. (Or not so recently, I suppose, but the sampler he gave me back in June got lost in the shuffle.) The first four songs, for my money, are pretty much perfect; after that, I begin to get bored. I've only heard a remix of a song from the second album, so I don't know if they've shaken things up or not for the new release.
• Listening to them both earlier tonight, I realised that the Decemberists' The Sporting Life has some strong musical commonalities with Adam Ant's Goody Two Shoes. The former song's been my introduction to the band, so I'm left with the question: are the Decemberists new-new-romantics?
• The Impact is the Michigan State University student radio station, and it's pretty great. I find myself in range of their transmitters for almost an hour of my typical Long Drives, and I make a point of tuning in. One of the many songs I've discovered through them is Fred Jones part 2 by Ben Folds, which is possibly the saddest song I've heard all year. (It's also notable for featuring Special Guest Star: John McRae on harmony vocals. You might well think that the lead singer of Cake's voice is not particularly well-suited for blending with the voices of other humans, but he and Ben make it work quite well.)

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Posted 06 Sep, 2006 at 20:40 by matt in /System | Permanent link

Today, in addition to being the birthday of one of the authors (hi Brent!), is the second bloggiversary of Dangling Conversations. Given that the front page still has posts from freakin' April on it, it's fair to say that the initial excitement has died down substantially.

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Posted 06 Sep, 2006 at 20:24 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

Had it not been for a stray comment in Neil Gaiman's blog, I might never have realised that Susanna Clark, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, also wrote one of my favourite stories in the Sandman: Book of Dreams anthology. I haven't picked up the volume since shortly after the Great Flood in my apartment over six years ago, and while I remember the story (Stopp't-Clock Yard) vividly, I had nothing to hang the author's name on in my mind at the time.

(Looking in the book now, it turns out that I still sort of follow the authors of my other two favourite stories; I've been reading Steven Brust for quite some time, and John M. Ford is one of the posters on Making Light.)

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Posted 24 Jul, 2006 at 18:14 by matt in /Science | Permanent link

Via Good Math, Bad Math: want a screen-saver that leans how to walk? My fellow OS X users should check out breveCreatures, developed in an A-Life simulation package called breve.

It's an evolutionary simulation: twenty-five critters made out of between two and many blocks (I've never seen one with more than eleven parts) are dropped onto a featureless plane, and each one in turn tries to walk (or, well, perambulate). Success is defined as maximum distance from the starting point; the more successful critters breed to populate the next generation, the less succcessful die out. Pretty standard genetic-algorithms type stuff.

The soon-to-be-released game Spore that Blue wrote about a while ago plays around with evolutionary ideas, but (from what I've read) does so in a particularly unscientific way. It's got player-designed organisms and a "march of progress" from simple aquatic creatures to planetary civilizations; those are great for a strategy game, but pretty much entirely against the spirit of the modern understanding of evolution. breveCreatures functions nicely as a demonstration of those same principles.

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Posted 30 Jun, 2006 at 17:47 by matt in /Home | Permanent link

It's been a day of picking up keys: I'm moving offices (this weekend) and moving house (over the next few weeks), and I've been given access to both of my new spaces today.

I've therefore spent an inordinate portion of my waking hours today wandering around in empty rooms, sometimes clutching a tape-measure, and envisioning things. The actual process of moving will be kind of arduous, but right now the sense of possibility is making me happy.

Let there be no more doubt about where I stand on the Judging/Perceiving axis: P all the way, baby.

(I'll post a link to photos once I've uploaded them. I'm using the cheapest damn digital camera money can buy --- it's like the Polaroid 600 of digital cameras --- so don't expect much.)

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