Tales from the BitfaceTales from the Bitface - LiveJournal.comThe Gun Club- June 26, 2008 I just listened to The Gun Club&8217;s first album, Fire Of Love. They&8217;re a band that I heard of all through my student years &8211; at least one good friend was a fan &8211; but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It&8217;s a scorchingly good album, and I&8217;d recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let&8217;s face it, who doesn&8217;t) to download it from Emusic forthwith. This entry was automatically crossposted from my blog, A Labourer at the...http://devilgate.livejournal.com/62189.html A Dream of Wessex, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 9)- June 20, 2008 This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jarslife-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories. Gibson&8217;s and the Wachowski&8217;s Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here &8211; or at least, they should be able to. I&8217;m not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea. At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in the near future (of the time the book was written; it&8217;s now our near past) a scientific research project has been under way for several years. It involves.http://devilgate.livejournal.com/61903.html Water on Mars- June 20, 2008 Phoenix has found water on Mars, by the way. This entry was automatically crossposted from my blog, A Labourer at the Bitface. You can comment here on LJ, but it might be nice if you commented over there.http://devilgate.livejournal.com/61480.html Fluidity- June 20, 2008 Why does no-one make themes that are fluid anymore By which I mean ones that re-flow the text when you resize your browser window, of course. This entry was automatically crossposted from my blog, A Labourer at the Bitface. You can comment here on LJ, but it might be nice if you commented over there.http://devilgate.livejournal.com/61211.html New theme- June 20, 2008 Have just activated a new theme for this site. It&8217;s called MNML, and it&8217;s designed especially for quick posts. As ever, I&8217;m not quite sure about it yet, but we&8217;ll seee. This entry was automatically crossposted from my blog, A Labourer at the Bitface. You can comment here on LJ, but it might be nice if you commented over there.http://devilgate.livejournal.com/61159.html The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 8)- June 17, 2008 What a fine conceit. Take the two great science fiction works by one of the genre&8217;s defining masters, mash them up together, and use the result to tell the &8216;inside&8217; story of both of them. It&8217;s title is an obvious allusion to The Time Machine, but this is actually much more rooted in The War of the Worlds. And why shouldn&8217;t those two novels take place in the same fictive universe And why shouldn&8217;t they be linked After all, Mr Wells wrote both the stories down,..http://devilgate.livejournal.com/60910.html 42 referendums and and a resignation- June 13, 2008 I can&8217;t decide on this David Davis thing Is it just a stunt Is he genuinely concerned enough about civil liberties to take the chance (small though it is) of losing his seat Certainly he sounds sincere when he talks about his concerns about the growth of state power; and Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty counts him as a friend, it seems. But as others have pointed out he has a bad reputation on some other rights votes. Still, there&8217;s no doubt in my mind that he&8217;d be better than...http://devilgate.livejournal.com/60444.html Newton&8217;s Wake: A Space Opera, by Ken Macleod (books 2008, 7)- June 8, 2008 A scorching, searing cyberpunk space opera. It has everything in it: FTL starships, uploaded minds, nanotech, the Singularity, wormhole gateways&8230; Absolutely stunning stuff. Though on the downside, I did find it bit hard to follow some of the plot twists and turns. Specifically, it wasn&8217;t always immediately obvious to me why some of the alliances and disputes between the various factions happened. I expect a more careful reading, or retracing of my steps, would have resolved those.http://devilgate.livejournal.com/60367.html Novelist Joanna Kavenna points out that I was wrong- June 6, 2008 Ok, I was wrong when I said that no other genres had disparaging abbreviations. &8220;I don&8217;t understand what chick-lit means, and to a degree it&8217;s just used to dismiss quite a lot of writing by women,&8221; she says. &8220;It&8217;s a blanket term that renders a wide variety of literature frivolous. It&8217;s used either to dismiss the writing or to avoid thinking about it.&8221; Stephen Moss interviews novelist Joanna Kavenna on her seven unpublishable novels, and eventual...http://devilgate.livejournal.com/60108.html Identity and letdown in The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall (books 2008, 6)- June 5, 2008 Eric Sanderson wakes without his memories. In short order he starts receiving messages apparently sent by his former self, is told by his psychiatrist not to read any such messages, and starts reading them &8211; in the wrong order, which leaves him unready for the trouble that is about to assail him. He is attacked by a &8216;conceptual shark&8217;: a living, sentient creature that is composed of ideas, of thoughts, of words; and that swims in the sea of information that surrounds us. This..http://devilgate.livejournal.com/59742.html |