Author: mdhughes

What I'm Reading: Network Effect, by Martha Wells

Finally the novel length treatment I've been asking for. Murderbot, calling itself just "SecUnit" in the company of friendly non-corporate Humans, does a perfectly adequate job protecting them from their poor decision-making, and becomes somewhat… not exactly social, but what passes for it.

“She grimaced. “Right, sorry.” Then she looked away and rubbed her eyes.

And I’d made her cry. Good job, Murderbot.

I knew I’d been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I’d attribute it
to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I
am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than an isolated event that
I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted,
but I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80
percent range.) I didn’t know what to say but I didn’t have time to do a
search for relevant apology examples. (And it’s not like I ever find any
relevant examples that I actually want to use.) I said, “I’m sorry for …
being an asshole.”
—Martha Wells, "Network Effect"

Then a rather familiar transport/gunboat shoots them up, and abducts them to another solar system, with some odd, hostile inhabitants, or "Targets" as Murderbot calls them.

Finally we get a little explanation of the wormhole transit system, much better detail on drone and network systems, and Corporation Rim colony setup. There's even a planetary surface described in… not great detail, but any detail? So that's different. Since reading this book I'm going back to reread the novellas with more background information.

There's as much internal chatter of Murderbot as ever, which is the thing that draws us weirdos to this, but also a lot of feed and voice chatter with others forcing some character development the novellas can't achieve.

It's organized almost along episodic A- B- plot beats, Murderbot kills everyone, there's a social/investigation sequence, backstory piece, repeat (four times? More or less).

The Targets and what's driving them takes a long time to be revealed, and how some of their software attacks are possible isn't clear until very late in the book.

And it's left set up for more stories, which is all Murderbot's after, too.

★★★★★ — inhaled it in a couple sittings.

Also, there was a prequel short story in Wired a couple years ago, which I just learned of:

Solitary Sunday Music

In this picture stands a man
Far away, alone and distant
Like a solitary field
In some nameless foreign land
All around him points of light
Start to dim and cease transmitting
—VNV Nation, "Solitary"

What I'm Watching: Train to Busan

A very standard modern zombie outbreak movie, remake of the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake with a Korean train instead of a mall. It's entertaining, but never really tense or frightening beyond jump scares. Lots of fake blood but very little gore, it's no Tom Savini flick.

The most neglectful financier asshole father and his implausibly nice daughter go on a train ride to let her visit her mother (separated, not yet divorced but you know they should be). Rest of the passengers are wrestler/MMA dude & pregnant wife, gay jock teen (well, he's closeted, but it explains his behavior) & his disappointed wannabe-girlfriend, two old ladies, scruffy hobo survivor, awful corporate executive, train crew, and a few extras who aren't gonna get even cardboard personalities. Names are in short supply, and provide no plot immunity, the train's aggressive about whittling down the cast.

The one slightly different take in this is everyone's moral except the asshole and the older executive is "cooperate, think about other people first". His self-interest and survival instinct would make him the hero in a Hollywood zombie flick, George Clooney in that garbage "we took the title from World War Z but none of the good stuff" flick. Everyone who acts selfishly in this dies horribly, except our asshole who gets to learn a lesson about being a team player and a good father.

But the real moral of the film, as with Snowpiercer, Harry Potter and the Horrible Train (I don't remember which book; all of them really), Throw Momma from the Train, Under Siege 2 (double threat: You might get molested by Steven Seagal, AND killed by terrorists), Murder on the Orient Express, and more, is: Don't get on a train. Drive on the roads, go cross-country on bikes, get a boat, whatever you have to do, never get on a train because it'll always be full of bad guys, you can't get off, and there's only one way forward or back. Even if you lock them in a carriage, they get off when you do. Trains = death.

I'm perplexed at how the asshole's assistant is still alive and making calls like business as usual, only suffering a little moral crisis, when everywhere else is infected. We hear other people dying on phone and TV.

The "safe zone" plays off the Korean DMZ. The country ought to be pretty secure against zombie plague, Seoul and a few other open urban areas might be a total loss, but between Korean and US military (currently 23,468 troops) every smaller city should be able to fortress up pretty quick, and we don't see that in this. Early on, politicians are just calling it "riots", and that has kind of a bad connotation for not-so-distant Korean history where rioters get killed by cops & military.

Let's talk about the fast zombie thing. Romero based Night of the Living Dead on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (adapted badly into movies that totally miss the point four or more times), where the recently-turned "vampires" were slow, stupid, lost their old mind and took some time to get new ones. And so in the first NotLD, they're slow, fried-chicken-eating, implacable, but incapable of even prying up a plank; easy pickings for Texans to kill off. In Dawn of the Dead they started to repeat living behaviors, and sometimes had basic hunting tactics. In Day of the Dead, probably the best of the series, they're becoming smart hunters like Bud and the ones in the cave; simple barriers no longer work, only total isolation will save you. In Land of the Dead, the living have tried to cohabitate with zombies, keeping up a barrier wall around a city, foraging outside, while the increasingly smart zombies try to get in. To take back their world from the monsters called "Humans", finally achieving what Matheson was after in a short novel after 4 movies. Zombies are threatening in these, not because they're fast or powerful, but because they never stop, and while they're not smart yet, they're getting smarter.

Fast zombies throw that out for a cheap jump scare. Turning takes a few seconds instead of the minutes or hours it takes to die and rise for the Living Dead; which means you can't have any drama about someone bit and turning, no hope of a cure or cauterizing a wound or any desperate measure. Just bite, they're dead and join the mob. The best case in this film is about 2 minutes, and that's for a limb bite on a named character; if you have no name, or get it in the neck, you're gonna turn so fast.

Additionally, we see these zombies have very limited senses, they hunch up and stagger around like drunk frat boys, they're not coordinated… until the scene needs them to be, and then they can run, jump, climb over each other. In some scenes they're charging berserkers, strong enough to bust glass doors & windows, in others they're weak and flabby, pathetic things just asking to be let in. So I'm a little frustrated and disappointed by all of the director's choices there. It's still fine, adequate, but that's what keeps it from getting that coveted half-star or more above average from me.

There's an animated prequel, Seoul Station (apparently on 'zon Prime? Will look later), and a sequel movie, Peninsula, supposed to come out this year, but obviously the current zombie^W coronavirus outbreak might interfere with that. There's also a Hollywood remake, which you should burn before watching; if only there was a zombie outbreak killing everyone in Hollywood, the average quality of movies in the world would double.

★★★☆☆

SteamVR Drops Mac Support

Now, that's just their VR headset, which is an extremely low-volume, 1% of the market gadget; VR's kind of awful in practice, but it keeps being "useful next year" for the last 40 years, and someday it'll be right. Steam as it is, >50% of the games I look at have a Mac version; it's not dead yet, but it definitely smells bad.

I blame Apple and their terrible support for gaming, in fact overtly hostile attitude. They like the PR opps at WWDC, and they like taking 30% gross profit of gachapon/IAP ripoff games made by Chinese clone factories, but never do anything after that, never provide game dev support on the platform, or put gamer GPUs in common hardware. They do not hire gamers or game developers, and they fired all the engineers in upper management, so it's just sales weasels left. And then killing 32-bit app support in Catalina just put a knife in any classic gaming.

The Mac used to be fun, a great desktop UNIX workstation which could also run a fair amount of games. Now, nothing works.

Elder Scrolls Online on the Mac is a pain in the ass these days, about half the updates make your camera spin out of control because ZOS doesn't have a Mac developer or any testing, either, they just rely on a cross-compiled build and push it out.

The suggestion to use Windows Boot Camp is just a giant middle finger, but what else are you gonna do?

Well. Given my plan to switch my workstation to FreeBSD when Mojave is EOL, I may accelerate that to this year, and have a partition for Windows just to play games. Which is stupid, but there you go, this is the dumbest, worst decade already just 4 months in, so why wouldn't computing be as bad as everything else?

Certainly anyone who uses Windows to try to do anything productive is… well, more masochistic than I am. It's just unbelievably awful and un-designed. I have a VirtualBox of it that I use for some testing, and it's like a 10-year-old read about CP/M, windowing systems, and bad middle management systems like stack ranking, coded it in BASIC and C, and then billions of dollars of business software and games were run on it. No part of that is a good idea.

Linux is so unbelievably awful; it's a half-assed server or embedded system, but not engineered for safety and reliability like a real UNIX workstation, the desktop is even more amateurish, and "business software" for it is comically bad. I'm not going to do that for a few half-working games.

But here we are. If I want to play games other than Animal Crossing, I suck it up and run a garbage OS as a partition.

The Thing About Orcs

So, there's this piece on Orcs and racism:

And they have a long blog post about Tolkien's racist origins of Orcs & "Eastern Men":

"The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
—J.R.R.Tolkien, Letter #210

Which I agree is pretty horrible, I greatly dislike Tolkien the man, and his post-Hobbit work. The post is kind of a waste of time to read beyond that, I eyerolled 180° at the quoting-white-men-about-racism tone, and denial of other people of colors' different experiences (Jason Momoa in particular). Maybe that's just how James talks, all the goddamned time. Someone should set up a medical research fund. Anyway, I'm only in this to read about the Orcs, shit that happens on Earth is not my problem.

My old solution to the Orc problem was to make Orcs tolerated and playable if they lived in civilization, but so culturally different in their nomadic tribes, that you still had something like the classic Human/Orc war trope. That can be problematic when compared to how the US, etc. treated Native Americans and other indigenous populations, but it cut down on the genocides/"we kill all the Orc babies"; players treated Orcs like a hostile tribe of Humans, warred against them until they stopped being annoying, and made peace.

But then why not just use Humans? That's James Raggi's solution, which technically works, but it's not interesting unless you throw an enormous book of "What do the Saxons believe and why are they so awful?" at the players which you don't want to write, and which they won't read. In history it was pretty easy to tell what culture someone was by their artifacts, dress, and speech; but none of those are easily visible in Theatre of the Mind role-playing.

So in everything I've run or written in the last few years, I solved the problem by replacing Orcs with Beastfolk, humanoids with bestial features chosen off a table of local mammals. They behave almost exactly like my previous use of Orcs, and yet because they're not all green-skinned pig-men, and might even be cute & fuzzy, especially the young ones, suddenly reaction is completely different. It either arouses or annoys furries, neither of which is my intention, but that's a small price to pay for how radically it changes the conversation.

I don't usually want "half-breeds", because that directly leads to racial theory bullshit, but in a magical world full of Owlbears it's certainly possible for species to be crossed, and Edgy McEdgertons always want to be a half-breed Goblin/Dark Elf with a tragic backstory or some such, so unless you want to waste half an hour arguing before the game, just say yes and move on.

LISP Machines

I really wish we had a front-end to software even half as useful as this in the 21st C, but technology has regressed massively since the '80s and '90s. Some of the old IDEs, before they became bloated "enterprise" software (because giant mega-corporations paid for them, not individual programmers, so the IDE makers serve their paymasters), started to slouch towards this kind of usefulness but fast and small. CodeWarrior, Project Builder/Interface Builder, Borland's Turbo Whatever.

emacs isn't the answer, it's an abandonment of the question; "modern" emacs turned away from the LM zmacs model, it's now just a terrible LISP interpreter with a bad text-only-editor front end; you can make tools in it, but nobody sane will want to use them. I'm perfectly comfortable with the emacs editing keys (well, obviously, Macs use emacs keys for all text areas), but the machinery in it is just broken.

I get excited about Chez Scheme having a nice REPL, with history and can edit multi-line blocks in the REPL, unlike the crappy readline almost every other Scheme uses. But it doesn't do hypertext, it doesn't do graphics, it barely has tab completion (procedure names only), it doesn't have any inline documentation & source inspector; all of those were in the LISP Machine.

When I'm working, I have my text editor (BBEdit or Atom mostly), a terminal with the REPL running and I copy-paste to it, 3-4 PDFs open (R6RS, R6RS-lib, CSUG, sometimes TSPL), and a web browser pointed at the SRFIs. If the Internet connection went down, I'd have to search the SRFI sources to figure out what's in there. I really need a better tool for this.

DrRacket can do some graphics inline, and the tab completion shows documentation hints in the top right corner, but as I note every time, it doesn't really have a REPL because it destroys the interactive environment every time you edit code; utterly useless for code exploration. And in practice, Racket is really horrifyingly slow; it does fine in focused benchmarks but real-world use it just falls over drooling.

The graphics part's sort of irrelevant, and sort of not; the way the LISP Machine worked was getting a "presentation" form for an object, which would render as text or drawings or images, and interacting with it sent messages back to that object. That's probably out of scope for anything except a complete new OS and terminal. A simplistic number-tagged hypertext would be good enough and orders of magnitude easier.

So. I'm not sure what to do here, I don't want to just complain about tools and not do anything about them. I could try to extract the docs to make a hypertext doc system; a lot of text processing on TeX source sounds painful, and a one-off job, I want a more universal solution. It may be possible to hook into Chez's completion to call a help system. Or it could be a standalone program that you feed several doc sources into, and it lets you search against them. Dash does that, but it's Mac and C/Objective-C primarily, and does poorly at other docsets.

Animal Crossing: Minecraft Edition

Finally got my town rating up to ★★★☆☆, K.K. Slider to visit, and unlock terraforming! \o/, so I've been digging all day:

Before:

acnh-20200404-yama-island
day one island map

After:

acnh-20200426-yama2
terraformed island map

Not a huge visible difference, the basic layout was nearly perfect (I would've preferred a mirror image where my mountain estate was on SW corner instead of SE, but I'm fine with it; it's the same layout as my Wild World village), but I moved the river course up against town hall to make a lot more space, added chokepoints (marked with path dots visible on the map) where I can jump across rivers, I'm still thinking about a couple more chokepoints or maybe river stepping stones?. Put a secret passage (covered in paths so nothing'll grow there) out to the north beach where Redd's ship pulls up. The temptation exists to build complex mazes, wipe out all the random character of the island, but so far I'm resisting. A dungeon hidden behind a mountain might be fun, though.

One frustration of this is, you can't change beachfront or the big rocks. I have some very inconvenient rocks in my east beachfront; pulling the cliffs back a couple blocks helped, but it's still not a straight run.

Another is, the entire user interface for building is "press A to do stuff". What stuff happens depends on whether you're 1 pixel forward or back of a grid border. Maybe you'll build up, maybe you'll rip down and create a slope, maybe you'll lower the block. You can't tell until you do it, and there's no grid lines, laser pointer, or undo. There's 14 in-game buttons and 2 joysticks Nintendo could've used to put each function on its own button, but they didn't. Of course, the rest of the interface is Nintendo Awkward, so why wouldn't this be? But it's a long sight from Minecraft (Java edition) where you can instantly hit 1-9 for items/tools, left click to hit, right click to build/place. Maybe they think the target market only knows Minecraft (Pocket edition) which has equally shitty controls, so being usable isn't necessary?

Playing the stalk market (buying and selling turnips) requires a little accounting, so I made a spreadsheet:

acnh-20200426-stalkmarket
stalk market spreadsheet

Blank copy, if you use Apple's Numbers: Stalk Market blank.numbers

Nintendo Switch Friend Code: Kamimark SW-5075-6646-9991

(hello, Twitter, which gets to see my images twice because that's the only way to get them off device, then again when I write a post!)

What I'm Watching: Man From Earth

This is up on 'zon prime, and written by Jerome Bixby, who (very relevantly) wrote the Star Trek TOS episode Requiem for Methuselah.

An apparently 30-something history professor (David Lee Smith) is leaving his job and town, and a few colleagues and friends (hey, the asshole biker professor is William Katt! He looks like shit 30 years since I last saw him, but he's still alive!) show up for a going-away party. They notice some oddities in his furnishings, and he tells them a story, that he's a 14,000 year old caveman, and the things he's seen, people he's met. They react with incredulity, get a shrink in…

The entire thing is shot in and just outside a little cabin, with a fireplace. Mostly one-camera, calm, long shots, actors mostly in character and reacting appropriately. I could wish for them to all speak a little more Howard Hawks, New Yorker speed instead of slow and laconic, I don't buy that some of these people are professors, but you work with what you can get on indie flicks.

The writing's not fantastic; he does question & answer, with often terse answers, not technical or detailed, and often interrupted by snarky people. There's one or two, where he's recalling scenery or people, that get something like actual SF writing. What I would like is long monologues about his people, about life in Sumeria, or Rome, or Paris. There's a Poul Anderson book, The Boat of a Million Years which covers a similar character, which has much longer expositions of the nature of living forever.

He has a story of meeting another unnamed immortal, which he puts in the 17th Century. It might possibly be a reference to Le Comte de Saint Germain, a reputed immortal and courtier, though he did eventually die. This is the kind of detail that would've improved the story.

And then there's a religious argument, with a devout true believer, because apparently one random decade in the Mideast 2000 years ago is more important than the other 14,000 years. I think this argument scene is defective in a few ways. First, the believer thinks the King James Version is a "recent" and "accurate" Bible, when in reality it's 400 years out of date and a known shitty translation, most modern Protestants (the theist here is openly anti-Catholic, which is hilarious if you're screaming "blasphemy!" at someone; a "religion" that splits into reformations every couple years is obviously not divinely inspired) use the New International Version, New Living Translation, or New American Standard Bible (for hardcore Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek literalists). I mostly quote KJV because it's poetic and used in so much English literature of the last 400 years, but I'm absolutely not trying to receive "truth" from it.

And while the voices of reason in the room explain the places where Christianity is copied from prior less-shitty religions, the theist is only capable of denying and crying, can't make any rational arguments. SIGH. Look, I'm an aggressive, mocking atheist, but we should be better about presenting the opposition argument than the Christian God's Not Dead idiots.

But I do like his 100-word New New Testament better than anything Christians have ever written in the last 2000 years. They would all be massively improved by switching to this belief.

★★★½☆

There is a sequel, Man From Earth: Holocene, written by the director of the first with no input from Jerome Bixby who was by this time dead, and the comments are harsh: "I've just finished watching Man From Earth: Holocene and this is less a review than a warning." Well. Maybe if I'm angry at myself I'll watch that for punishment.

There's also a movie on Netflix, He Never Died, starring Henry Rollins(!!!), about another immortal, though it's more religious/magical, if played for… not comedy, but funny horror? ★★★★☆ for that.

Forgotten Future Friday Music

Videogame Exploration

Which I've brought up many of these before, but Proteus, Dear Esther, and Bernband especially, everyone should play. I've played and enjoyed most of Connor Sherlock's sims, but they're ~50% half-broken and all very similar to each other; but still great art pieces you can explore.

I need to play Obsolete, it seems.

And more recent than this video: