I used a Mac in my office at Georgia Tech, and I’ve had one in my office
at UL for about a year now. But I’ve only been using Macs exclusively
for about a month now after the purchase of a Macbook Pro. Now, it’s
important to understand that the Gateway laptop I had been using before,
which had come with Vista and improbably enough had a driver
incompatibility of some type with Ubuntu that I wasn’t able to fix, was
one of the shittiest pieces of hardware that’s ever been manufactured.
The hard drive on my previous laptop failed immediately after I returned
from an overseas archive, and, when I purchased this latest computer,
the one I replaced it with was on the verge of failing again. Windows
Update had gotten hopelessly entangled, and it may have even been the
case that the computer had become infected with malware. Vista is such
an incredible waste of an operating system, that I, who have been using
and programming computers for almost twenty-five years now, was actually
unable to tell if it was a hardware or software problem, or some pas de
deux into planned obsolescence.
It’s still early, certainly, but none of the reviews I’ve read of this
seem to understand its premise. There are acknowledgments of direct
quotations in the back of the book, an unusual paratextual gesture, but
a key conversation in it comes almost directly from an essay by Robin
Hanson called “How to Live in A
Simulation”. The
paper is one of those rare cultural artifacts that instantly refutes any
attempt at ideological analysis through proud transparency:
Since my last few posts have been about interactive fiction, an
enthusiasm I tend to revive around the time of the annual competition, I
will write a few words about Mike Roberts’s Perdition’s
Flames (1993). I had students in an
introduction to literature class at Georgia Tech write a brief IF
interpretation of some the things we had been reading in class, and I
suppose what I had in mind as the ideal result would have been something
with the same sense of humor and technical facility seen in Roberts’s
Return to Ditch Day, though I did
realize at the time that it was an unrealistic expectation. It was the
engineering background combined with a certain wry humor that really
appealed to me about that game, and you see these qualities, in a
somewhat embryonic form, in Perdition’s Flames.
Though I didn’t finish his Snowquest, the likely winner of this year’s
Interactive Fiction competition, I did play (and finish, without hints,
albeit one point shy of perfect) Eric Eve’s The Elysium
Enigma recently. In fact, I mostly
finished it while the Florida-LSU game was on in the background on
Saturday night, though I don’t remember who won.
(The following discussion spoils the game completely.)
You play a mildly dim imperial functionary sent to raise the flag on a
backwater planet. A interplanetary civil war is fomenting in the
background, and you gradually discover that there was a military
slaughter on the planet a few generations ago, which hardened the
colonists’ luddism.
I’ve now played most of the entries in this year’s interactive fiction
competition. I didn’t play the windows games
because I don’t use that platform anymore (and I never played them when
I did, to be honest). Nor did I play the Adrift games, though they might
well have worked with Spatterlight. I guess I have an unreasoning
prejudice.
The first IF I played was Deadline on the Commodore 64, bought at a
Kmart when I didn’t know what it was or what to expect. The Zorks,
Planetfall, Starcross, Suspended, the Enchanter series (I almost solved
Spellbreaker without Invisiclues; the only thing that stumped me was the
damn outcropping/box, which I later discovered was the undoing of many
others), and a few others were great sources of diversion. I would
frantically make notes to myself about how to solve puzzles in class. It
got to the point that I was accused of making secret notes to myself for
studying by peers who saw me do this (and who apparently disapproved of
the notion of notetaking and related behaviors; Atlantic Elementary was
not always a school of academic distinction). Sorcerer, which I was
working on the spring of seventh-grade year, which was a distressingly
long time ago now that I think about it, was one which really kept me
occupied. The puzzle design was quirky and full of red herrings, with
the time travel bit in particular being highly incomprehensible. It now
seems clear that the difficulty of these games was designed to encourage
the purchase of the cluebooks, as the internet was not yet a viable
source of solutions and clues.
I believe that I loved my time like others love their country with the
same exclusivity, the same chauvinism, the same partiality. And I
despised other epochs with the blindness that they apply to despising
other nations. And my time has been defeated.
I always thought that something, in 1920-25, was almost born: Lenin,
Freud, Surrealism, revolutions, jazz, silent films. All this could
have come together. And then each followed its sporadic destiny.
Isolated, they could all be strangled. It is only in my memory that
they made up a world.
The recent dead salmon bit that’s going around is a wonderful
distillation of contemporary received wisdom about neuroscience. In the
world of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s latest scalp-massager on Fox, the
salmon would not be actually in the process of transformation into a
Deep One, but rather would be under the control of a mischievous
adolescent whose wishes are fulfilled through incredible technology he
alone controls. Those mind-control fantasies are regulated, however, by
various paternal and maternal figures who keep him busy but frustrated.
I think that Whedon recognizes the usefulness of this psychodynamic
outlay, as it was one of the major plot points of most seasons of Buffy
(the sixth in particular).
The best review I’ve read of Inherent Vice thus far has been Thomas
Jones’s piece in the LRB. I
was especially pleased with the surprising comparison to Smollett. Also,
the proposed dialectic relationship between Pynchon’s anarchist
utopianism and technocratic capitalism—that the true lesson is that
one is not imaginable without the other—leaves us to conclude that
Pynchon is not in fact given to sentiment, does not want anyone to keep
cool but care, but is rather a nihilist.
If you visited here two days ago, you may have noticed that I had
decided to start linking to several thousand sites selling cheap
pharmaceuticals. Rather than a bold business decision, this was the
result of an SQL-injection bug, which Wordpress, even the latest version
(if you don’t take certain precautions and probably even then) is
vulnerable to.
To the best of my knowledge, it’s all cleared up, though google is not
indexing my site, and I ended up nuking several old course blogs even
though I don’t think they were necessarily infected. What’s even more
comforting is that the attack originated from my own host.
