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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Posted 06 Apr, 2006 at 19:13 by matt in /Science | Permanent link

The fishapod.

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Posted 31 Mar, 2006 at 13:15 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

July 25th: the Animaniacs on DVD.

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Posted 22 Mar, 2006 at 17:17 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

Picked up a new stick of memory for Titania the Powerbook earlier this week, in hopes that maybe she'll run a little smoother. (My peripheral-storage-heavy lifestyle leads to some quirks now and again, and I'm hoping to ameliorate them at least slightly.) This leaves open the question of what I should be doing with the old memory stick that used to be in there.

The guy I was talking to at the computer store this past weekend suggested that eBay was a reasonable solution; I'm not convinced that's the case, since the sale prices the guy was quoting were a little inflated. From the looks of things, if I did sell the stick (PC2700 256MB 333MHz SODIMM, if anyone's interested) then UPS would probably make more on the deal than I would, and something about that bothers me.

I have this problem with computer equipment in general, really --- too many old bits of computers, with the conviction that there's a better solution than just throwing them away but no clear idea about what that solution is. 256MB of notebook memory is just the most recent bit for the pile.

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Posted 16 Mar, 2006 at 12:50 by matt in /Social | Permanent link

The Beer Bistro: a new restaurant in downtown Toronto, devoted to the simple premise that beer makes everything better.

Any of you folks who might be in T-dot this Saturday (the 18th) should feel welcome to join Kael and I in checking this place out. Meet there around 6ish. If you're a random interweb surfer who doesn't know us, you're welcome too; I'll be the one in the funny hat.

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Posted 13 Feb, 2006 at 23:48 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

Happiness is rediscovering a great song that you completely forgot.

I quite enjoyed The Royal Tenenbaums when it came out. Yes, it was very self-consciously quirky, but done so well --- and with so much sincerity from the cast --- that it could be forgiven. I've seen the film twice, the last time over three years ago, but I've got a lot of bits of it stuck in my mind. The most intense of these bits (which I remember seriously creeping me out in the theatre) is a sequence where one of the characters attempts suicide; it's spooky to me for a lot of reasons, but the thing that really drove the scene was the music in the background.

Of course, it's often the soundtrack that gives a movie scene its emotional impetus, as The Opposite of Sex observed so cleverly. The song itself, lyrically and musically, fit perfectly with the narrative of the film; moreover, it was the only really contemporary song in a film whose soundtrack was heavily based in older music, and even not knowing the song in advance the difference in production values communicated something to me.

Anyhow, the point of this is: I really, really liked the song at the time. And then the rest of the movie happened, and the song didn't really stick around in my head. Same thing a year later, watching the movie on DVD: great song, and then gone. I've recently discovered it again --- Needle in the Hay, by Elliott Smith --- and have been grooving on it.

It's a song that will always have association of suicide for me: from the character in the movie, and from Smith himself who took his own life in 2003. It's not by any means a happy song to begin with, full of anger and yearning. And yet... it makes me feel better when I hear it. It fills a hole in my mind, and I'm pleased to have rediscovered it.

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Posted 23 Jan, 2006 at 22:04 by matt in /World | Permanent link

As of this writing, it's looking like the Conservatives have a small plurality in the federal election, and hence we'll have a new minority government. This is not one of my preferred outcomes -- I don't like the Conservatives in their current incarnation, and distrust a lot of the ideas they've been tossing about -- but it could have been a lot worse.

What happens now? Presumably the Conservatives aren't going to form a coalition with the Liberals; the NDPs, even if they could get along, aren't large enough to take a majority; so if the Conservatives are going to make a formal coalition, it's got to be with the Bloc. That seems unlikely, both because the Conservatives had a stronger showing in Quebec than expected -- and hence represent a real competition to the BQ -- and because of the rhetoric that Harper was tossing around back in December. The theory, then, is that the Conservatives will try to get support on an issue-by-issue basis, trusting that the other parties won't want to rock the boat and plunge Canada into another election anytime soon.

Reactions?

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Posted 18 Jan, 2006 at 16:07 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

In case you're on the look-out for "speculative fiction"...

• Bellwether by Connie Willis. This is my second attempt at Willis' work -- I hated The Doomsday Book, finding it tedious and full of characters I just couldn't bring myself to care about -- and this one went a lot better. Lots of neat bits about fads and the nature of scientific discovery, with not terribly inaccurate hints of chaos theory dropped in the mix.
• Idlewild and Edenborn by Nick Sagan. Neil Gaiman characterized the first of these as "Zelazny's Amber meets the Matrix", and there's certainly elements of both. (Idlewild starts with the first-person narrator waking up without any memory of who he is, which is pretty blatant as homage goes.) I didn't like how Idlewild ended, but the sequel puts it into some perspective. There's a lot of good world-building here, and some clever auctorial games.
• The Alera Codex by Jim Butcher. I came to these books by familiarity with the author's noir-fantasy series The Dresden Files, which I heartily recommend to anyone else who likes noir-fantasy. (If you have no idea what I mean by that, then check them out, or Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, to see what I'm talking about.) I'm not as fond of these books -- which are more high-fantasy in tone, but with a good richness of plot and political complexity; think Guy Gavriel Kay, or Jacqueline Carey, or Robin Hobb -- but they're still definitely worth reading.

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Posted 17 Jan, 2006 at 16:39 by matt in /System | Permanent link

You'll notice in the sidebar that we've got a new author on the site: Lisa, whose name has probably come up before in the context of being Brent's wife. Welcome!

I wanted to say that this makes Lisa our seventh author, but since our next-most-recent addition (Sky) has yet to bother posting anything, if she's quick I'm guessing she'll actually be the sixth. Although from another point of view she's the eighth, since there's a guy named Jason who asked to be put in the system over a year ago (and was; I even announced it) but who hasn't been heard from since. Or at least, not by me. It was maybe a little drunk out when he made the request, so I'm guessing he forgot all about it.

Anyway. Lisa, world; world, Lisa. Huzzah!

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Posted 12 Jan, 2006 at 14:22 by matt in /Books | Permanent link

For whatever reason, it seems like I can't go more than a fortnight or so without reading someone or other talking about The DaVinci Code; most recently, a thread on Crooked Timber about Judas revisionism. I've not read the book, and really have little inclination to read the book, but maybe some of you have.

If so, could you tell me what that book has that Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco does not? Or is there no serious comparison to be had between the books? Is Dan Brown just another of Belbo's lunatics?

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Posted 04 Jan, 2006 at 22:46 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Wow, it's been pretty quiet around these parts of late.

Caught a matinée of The Producers today with my Lovely Former Assistant. (Or Former Lovely Assistant? She's not my assistant anymore, but retains her loveliness.) As we were discussing the film afterwards, she told me that they'd deliberately tried to make it as close to the stage production as they could -- that is, they weren't making a movie of the show so much as packaging up the show onto film, if you follow me.

This shows in a number of ways. The ones that stood out for me were in the lighting choices, since that's something that I know a (very) little bit about; several scenes were lit in a very theatrical way, with no attempt at naturalism. (For instance, in one case a song starts and a totally white room is now lit in blue. Why? Not because of any external events -- the sun hasn't gone down or anything -- but because that's really what the song calls for.) Likewise the choreography, and the costumes, and -- well, and nearly everything. Everything was stylised. This isn't terrifically unusual in live theatre, where everything is stylised to some degree or another and abstract designs are fairly common; it's a little unusual in modern popular film.

Compare and contrast with the movie of Rent that came out a month or so ago. The Rent movie is very much a movie; while still a musical in conception, the producers of the film took full advantage of their medium. So you get Mark singing part of the opening number while cycling through the streets of New York, and it works very well, and it's an effect that would be nearly impossible to achieve on stage. Most of the rest of the staging is changed similarly; you get a lot of moving cameras, a lot of big outdoor scenes, very naturalistic lighting, etc.

Rent is conceived as a movie which happens to be based on a musical; like most movies in mainstream American cinema, it embraces an aesthetic of realism because realism -- concreteness, naturalism -- is something that film adapts to very easily. The Producers is a theatrical musical on film, and rejects bog-standard realism in favour of the theatrical experience of abstraction. (This isn't the only alternative to realism, of course; Sin City creates a different kind of abstraction, melding the comic-book aesthetic of its source with a kind of hyper-realism, and Naked Lunch creates a kind of surrealistic nightmare. But it seems that realism is the default setting for American cinema; to some extent, we even judge animated film based on how close it comes to realism.)

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Posted 13 Dec, 2005 at 16:17 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

I heard Great White's Once bitten twice shy this afternoon while being forced to listen to the local Classic Rock station. (Or one of them, I don't really keep track of commercial radio anymore.)

I believe that the conclusion is unescapable: classic rock is dead. If the term had any meaning before other than "songs you'd thought you'd gotten away from a dozen years ago", then it does so no longer.

Perhaps the masses will now see their way to rising up and tearing down the bastions of classic rock, replacing them with broadcasters of music that doesn't suck.

But probably not.

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Posted 30 Nov, 2005 at 12:40 by matt in /Games | Permanent link

Much like last year, Brent and I spent a goodly portion of my visit to his world last week playing Civ: in this case, the newly-released Civ 4. (Well, newly-released for his platform, albeit not mine... yet.) Each Civ game has been deeper/more complex than its predecessor, and so it is with this one; while I still find it absorbing, in a lot of ways this new release has reminded me exactly how/why I'm not a (computer) gamer.

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Posted 16 Nov, 2005 at 20:24 by matt in /FoodDrink | Permanent link

Nota bene: I am fully aware that there are those who feel that the eating of veal is a sin and a shame. That may be; however, it is a very tasty sin and shame, and one that I have no intention of ceasing to commit. It is unlikely that your impassioned words will convince me to do so, in case you were planning on leaving a comment to the effect of U R TEH B4D.

With that out of the way...

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