6 February 1998: Exegesis

Friday, 6 February 1998:

Exegesis

Along with reading the Java book, I've also been plugging away at Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which is a 500-odd-page collection of stories by James Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon). I was interested in reading it mainly because of a stage production of her story "The Man Who Walked Home" at WisCon 21. Unfortunately, I decided to finally put the book down after making only occasional, small progress through it for the last couple of weeks. Although I know I've been sinking a lot of time into other things (especially since my computer came back up), I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it that much.

The main reason I wasn't enjoying it was that her stories contain an awful lot of excess baggage; large amount of text which don't serve to further the story and which are not interesting in their own right. (The first six or eight pages of "The Women Men Don't See" is a perfect example of this.) Moreover, although the basic ideas on which the stories rested were not uninteresting, they didn't seem to justify the verbiage of the stories. Indeed, "The Man Who Walked Home" was easily the best of the stories I read.

Just not my kind of thing. Maybe I just prefer more flamboyant stories. But if you like particularly dark writing, then you might enjoy it.

After putting down Smoke, tonight I picked up and read (in one sitting - a rarity for me) Exegesis, by Astro Teller (his real name? I dunno). It's a story (a novella or maybe a novelette) about a woman whose AI project succeeds and becomes sentient. It's almost entirely told through the e-mail they exchange, and it takes place only a few years from now (I actually starts on my 31st birthday, January 16, 2000). It's fairly believable, concise, to-the-point, and is a tragedy. It explores the nature of being, but in an oblique manner which is more engaging than many efforts I've seen. (I'm sure Edgar owes a lot to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

The book could easily be expanded upon. Its fundamental premise that an AI would initially spend most of its time browsing the Web and posting to newsgroups to consume the responses is provocative, and I'm sure a longer story could expand on other useful things it might do. But as a unit Exegesis is fine as it is.

Next up is J. G. Ballard's Memories of the Space Age. I've never read any Ballard, although a friend of mine swears by him (well, almost). This one intrigued me in the store so I bought it on impulse.

Work took a decided upswing today. We may finally be moving back into a mode of day-to-day operation which is closer to how I'd really like to be working (a number of medium-sized projects to work on, with more latitude for when to work on them). We'll see. I was glad in a development meeting today to express my own expectations for the timetable of our current project (the "official" timetable for which has been implied, but rarely codified).

I'm not sure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that the Friday shift at the coffee shop now seems to consist of the three most attractive women who work there. Not, I guess, that you really needed to know that.

eBay was amazingly slow yesterday. I suspect either one of their servers was getting fried, or they just needed to get some more computing power. They seem to have replaced it with a different server which is much faster. Or maybe it's just due to it being Friday night. I've got a few potentially-winning bids in place; I have yet to actually win any auctions, though. But the winning bids on those I've lost are clearly more than I wanted to pay, so no big deal.

I played some more Myth: The Fallen Lords tonight. I'm still stuck on the second scenario. I played it twice tonight; the first time I took out most of the bad guys but was unable to get the actual target. The second time I just got overwhelmed by bad guys due to bad planning on my part. I'll get it eventually. The archers are so damned blind sometimes, but I suspect they get better as they gain experience (and don't get killed). I'm getting a bit better with the dwarves, too. The dwarf has become my "I don't have time for this" unit.

I must admit I take some small pleasure in Ceej's admissions of sub-optimality at Myth. I'm incredibly competitive, even when there's no apparent reason. I suspect it's part of my goal-oriented attitude toward things. In this case, Ceej is just about the only person I know (or should that be "know", since we've never met) who plays the same sort of computer games I do, and I'm sure she's as-good-as-I-am-if-not-better in the intellectual skills department, so it gives me a useful barometer to measure myself against.

We can argue later about the lack of virtues about whether I should be measuring myself against someone else in the realm of computer games.

I also been ruminating lately on the "never where I want to be"-ness of my life. (I used that phrase as the title of a few zines in my APA recently; I stole it from Peter Gabriel's song "Solsbury Hill".) I'm always striving to "get somewhere" - to finish a book, complete a project, accumulate certain stuff, or whatever - and I rarely feel satisfied when I do finish the task; I just move right on to the next task, and occasionally wonder, "Where will it all end? When do I get a break?" I'm coming to realize that this is a particularly vicious mental trap, and I'm not sure how to break it. But I've only just begun to think about it.

One glimmer of hope is that there are some things that don't leave me feeling impatient or frustrated while they're occurring, and empty or unsatisfied when I finish them. These tend to be the creme-de-la-creme of my experiences, and/or things which leave me thinking and reminiscing about them when they're complete. Things like Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow, or George R. R. Martin's novel The Armageddon Rag. Or the computer game MYST. Or watching a baseball game and following the baseball season. Or having a particularly good social experience with a friend, the sort that I wish wouldn't end.

But these are few and far between, relatively speaking. Mostly I'm always trying to run a little faster, and crane my neck to see what's around the next corner.

I'm having problems with my feet recently. First it was that the soles were hurting at irregular times. So I went out and bought new insoles for my sneakers. Then it was a general ache on the top and sides of my feet. I think it's because I've been double-tying my laces (I started a couple of months ago because the laces kept coming undone), which is keeping my feet from being able to stretch as they need to. So I'm going to go back to single-tying them and see how that works. Right now my feet have a dull ache despite only having my slippers on; I suspect they were particularly unhappy with the sneakers tonight.

Or maybe I just need new sneakers. I'll try a few things over the next month or two, and if the problem persists I guess I'll have to go to the doctor.

Or, maybe I just need to lose some damn weight.

By the way, have I instructed you to check out Cheapass Games? Yes, have some.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)