Swibbles

Game review on nytimes about being a surveillance agent as the primary player, like your a lowly security camera watching hack trapped in the dark rooms at ungodly hours with a diet of bad coffee and hostess… as if reality wasnt reality enough… but it looks interesting. Reminds me of an old game on the apple i beleive.. metareal. you lead a little thing through puzzles et al, but this game clearly has graphics behind the scope of one-inch pixelated blocks.  perhaps because its french the writing seems actually good also… too bad its for ms windows/pc though.

Browsing the noosphere I found out over at TerraNova that an old book of which ive only read excerpts is now freeasinfree so I took the time to read it during last weeks slew of travel around Europe to various conferences [which were a blast]. The one thing that had stuck with me way back in the when was first of course the story of Bungle. But the second and stronger impression I carried with me the last decade or so was the movement between the voice of “The_Author” in its now retro screenfont and the rest of the exposition. I have thought for awhile that the old list of literary tropes might have to be updated or reexamined a little more in the light of such moo-ly and mud-ly constructed texts. For example, it could be merely an allegory, but its more as if it is a logfile of a conversation. So do we have to make the actual conversation between the entities in the text the focus of any comparative literary analysis, or is a logfile its own? Ala Joyce, is he modern because of his choice of a logfile format to describe mr blooms daze?

I recently perused various the book reviews of Soon I Will Become Invincible, and after seeing so much about the earlier day of the triffids and nanotech plant threats it seemed only fitting to follow up with a review of agood book I recently finished over the summer, excepting for the fact that someone beat me to it. It seems a game-designing, victorian-literature-making, new-york-times-writing auteur made a stir by placing some normal people into skin tight costumes and sent them out on a planetwide rampage. The book Soon I Will Be Invincible is an excellent, humorous, funny, and did I mention humorous read, well worth it. Plus, I noticedthe book cover is designed by chip kidd. Anyhow, if you wish, the book should give enough of a taste for your reading tasting pleasures.

Radio interview today about the Ticking Time Bomb effect in real life. A common mythological trope, it was stated, it is the motivating force behind most television and movie dramas, or “page turners” to us more literary afflicted. It is also the one position that will make people support torture. “You mean, if someone is ogling to blow up the city with nanotech goo, would I kill them? I guess, in that case, I would have to!” The problem comes, it seems, in the fact that there hardly ever is a ticking time bomb, and if there is, its damage is so much more localized than the damage caused by overreacting to the time bomb: in terms of authoritative crackdowmns, smackdowns, etc etc. Unfortunately, our current administration is currently in the drivers seat of the country using this technically fictional effect. Boom.

Subscribing to some of these automated consumer-tracker things from amazon and have received a slew of reccomendations based on my “reading history”… hey! get the hell outta my history! which say I would apparently like this what-seems-to-me-evil-marketing-ploy-term, the New Weird. Ok, please. lets just stick with Fantasy or Sci Fi. Seems like a lot of hogwash. There is only One True God, of course, and that is Philip K. Dick. Ive read The Scar by China Mieville but didnt like it, not a big fan of fantasy stuff. Hes got a new one out Un Lun Dun but dont know if i’ll try it, might wait for the library circuit. Also read A.K. Otterness and thought it was pretty good, though I dont know why it was listed under new weird. Its definately sci-fi. Never heard of the author before but guess an old magazine sci fi writer. The writing was kinda like reading those Dick stories where he just spews stuff out, but still holds it together. Not bad. Also, Ray Bradbury has a new one out, about dragons. I wish theyd leave off this fantasy. clue: Fantasy->escapism. Science Fiction->save-the-world-truth. Yep. Time for a swibble hit.