Nerdtacular
Oct 25, 2007 Uncategorized
I’ve just re-read one of my favourittteee books. And boy is it knee deep in nerdiness. So much so that it warrants the use of the excellent word ‘nerdtastic’ which as you know is defined as…
“Something generally not cool, but to a nerd its fucking fantastic”
The book is Excession by Iain M. Banks, king of science fiction. I’d sort of like to tell you what the story is about, but even though I’ve read it at least three times I still ain’t so sure. What I do know is this….
It’s set in our galaxy, but focuses on a civilisation called the Culture who are basically gods, they can do almost whatever they like, pretty much. They can change sex, never have to die, can cure hangovers just by thinking about them, you know… all the important things.
As for the story itself, well, something appears in the Galaxy that is pretty much capable of time travel – and this gets the characters in the book damp with excitement. Thus ensues a crap load of plotting, subterfuge, counter plotting and sheer confusion for the reader. This does not stop the story being absolutely fantastic.
I think one of the problems with following the twists is that the main characters in the books are Minds. I’ve written that with a capital M because they’re kind of the gods of this already pretty much god-like society and as you know god-like characters need capitalising (of course excluded god, because that’s just silly). The problem with them is that the minds inhabit Ships (note the capitalisation again) which tend to have pretty damned amazing and complicated names. For example
Poke it with a stick
Of course I still love you
god told me to do it
Helpless in the face of your beauty and my favourite…
Of course I still love you
god told me to do it
Helpless in the face of your beauty and my favourite…
Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again
Aren’t they amazing! But unfortunately their names coupled with the weird-ass eMail style way they communicate makes it difficult to follow sometimes!
Suffice to say though, it has some love interest, hot sex, kick-ass-weaponry and some big bangs. It’s fine art I say!
Let me find two of the best quotes…
Firstly, describing the ‘Excession’ – the thing that has suddenly appeared in the galaxy…
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.”
Next, a romantic encounter…
“She was nearly as tall as he was, perfectly proportioned, and she had four arms! A drink in each hand too. His kind of female, he’d decided instantly, even as she was looking admiringly at his folded, snow-white wings. She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Her whiskered mask was porcelain-bone studded with rubies and finished with iridescent badra feathers.
She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he’d looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces.”
She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he’d looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces.”
Wow! To finish though, part of the problem with the Culture is that it is horrifically, terrifyingly powerful. Ships can easy destroy entire solar systems. But the use of such weaponry gives away the fact that the society is obviously still dependent on them and hasn’t come much further from a caveman from a stick. In the story there is a lot of hand-wringing about weapons and war and guilt and how childish and obsessed some ancient primitives were when they see big explosions…. Well, I spent the entire book rubbing my thighs with glee, total glee, when there was a bit with explosions and compressed anti matter weapons and knife missiles and and and *needs to go and have a lie down*. Sigh, I’m just a caveman, call me Ug and pass me that stick.
I’m officially boring
Oct 15, 2007 Uncategorized
See, what am I supposed to do or talk about now I’ve run the 10K?
No, I’m not running a 10M, or a half m******n, or a m******n, so there, I won’t even say the words.
I watched a great film, Stranger Than Fiction, watch it. Um… see, nothing else is interesting!
So, I need hints and ideas please. My TV and the sexy home cinema is all in, nothing to see there, I have bought yet another sexy radiator, I… sigh, I have nothing else to say.
The End
Holy Crap Call The FBI
Oct 7, 2007 Uncategorized
How on earth… am I *smiling* in this photo? How? Really, how?
I R Marathoneer
Oct 7, 2007 Uncategorized
Hmm, Well that *sounds* like it’s the technical term for running. I was going to go with “hero of the universe”, but modesty is my middle name
I WINNED I WINNED ME ME ME ME ME WINNED!
Well it’s over, thank jeebus! And I have proof…
OK so you have to click on it to be able to read. But out of 18 pages of results, there is me… on page… well, let’s not go into the page numbers eh. IT’S NOT PAGE 18 SHUTUP!!!
As for the event itself, my god I was nervous. Forgeting to breath was the least of my problems. I messed up my iPod as we started and was listening to the wrong song, I had no idea what my pace was I just flowed with the crowd, well flowed behind the crowd mainly. But then it got difficult… now you know from my blogging that something bad always happens on my runs… this time it was cars.
It turns out there was a big car event on at Goodwood, so for about 2K of the run it was single line running next to 5000 cars all driving at 2mph and burping fumes over us all! Bstds! It was really icky breathing for that entire time and there was no way today that I was going to make the day of any hobo.
The second problem was the heat. It’s October… October isn’t summer. But it was sunny and 18degrees. WTF?!?!?! Sweaty nipple city!
Ah that reminds me of my third problem, I bought a new proper running shirt yesterday and wore it for the first time today… bad idea. Some git in a sweatshop in Cambodia thought it’d be funny to line the inside of my top with sandpaper. If anyone finds my nipples, pleassse give them back to me! I wored them off!
My most pressing thought round the entire circuit was that it was absolute hell and I wanted to die. Surely Paula Radcliffe doesn’t think those sort of thoughts? Hmm, well maybe in Athens she did. Anyway it wasn’t fun, at all.
For the last 3k of the run I was continually in a race with a woman who was so short she had to take detours around cracks in the road. There was no bloody way I was going to be beaten by her and thankfully in the last 100m I was able to muster enough energy to sprint past woohooo. Oh great, now I look at the results and see she was in the veterans group so not only short but older than me as well. Sigh, shakes tiny fist at sky!
I followed some critical warm down procedures after the run…
- Collapsed in a heap
- Went to Sainsburys and bought a roast chicken, roast spuds, beer and pringles
- Ate and Ate
- Drank and Drank
- Fell asleep in my running outfit for 3hours
Um, maybe that should be in my training book? Or actually, not.
Thanks for all the text messages of support, sorry to anyone who put money on me dying (-:
p.s. Not hinting or anything, but my official prize was a mug. I think the universe owes me… right? everyone? I WANNA PONY!
The Book Thief
Oct 6, 2007 Uncategorized
Sigh, Just thinking about this book makes me want to cry! Let’s start with the cover as you know by now that the cover is a very important start to a book. This is my book cover…
And, I dunno… I don’t really think I like it. For starters it’s made from quite an absorbent material so reading it in the bath wasn’t too practical. And, well… the picture is good I suppose. I dunno. Sommit about it isn’t quite right! I did google the book cover though and there are alternatives…
Bleagh, rubbish. Next one is pretty good though, covers two small parts of the story…
The last one, hmm, not a great image… the blood just looks rubbish…
I guess cultural issues must have made the publishers come out with different covers? Anyway, the story is narrated by Death with a capital D and is set in WWII. You end up having real empathy for Death as when he retrieves a soul from a dead body he tries to not look at them, not get caught up in the persons story. He just stares up at the moving sky above and thinks of the colours. This often doesn’t work though and he ends up following a persons sad story and keeping it with him for all eternity. By the end of the book you really think he needs a holiday (like the Death character from the Terry Pratchett books).
The other main character is Liesel, a young girl living through the horrors of the war in Germany. Her family end up hiding a Jew in their basement and she forms a fantastic friendship with him… I won’t say much more apart from Death pretty much warns you as the story progresses that things are going to go bad… and they do. For the last couple of pages in the book I just sat in the bath filling it by emptying myself out of my eyes, it was so heartbreaking. Let me go and find the book as I marked a couple of lovely sections….
The first is when the German people congregate for a book burning…
“When Liesel tried to make her way through, a crackling sound prompted her to think that the fire had already begin.
It hadn’t.
The noise was kinetic humans, flowing, charging up.
They’ve started without me!
Although something inside her told her that this was a crime – after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned – she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn’t help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.”
The second section comes about when Max the Jew (who has been hidden in a basement and not seen the sky for nearly two years) sneaks out in an air-raid when everyone else is in a bunker…
“‘I…’ He struggled to answer. ‘When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the living room was open just a crack… I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds’
He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months.
There was no anger or reproach. It was Papa who spoke. ‘How did it look?’. Max lifted his head, with great sorrow, and great astonishment. ‘There were stars,’ he said. ‘They burned my eyes.’
Wow. The rest of the book is pretty much like that. At first it annoyed me when Death gave so much of the story away, but really he didn’t. We all know that places like Dachau were the destination of Jews in WWII, the story comes from how they got there.