Fluffy puppy on a textured lawn

 Every part of this photo seems to invite fingers to run across it.

Ika on Parrish Beach.

This post's theme word is talpa (n), either "a mole (the animal)" or "a cyst". The dog is sniffing for talpa in the lawn.

The water table

 This pedestrian tunnel beneath the train tracks is, apparently, below the level of the water table post-rainfall.

Huzzah for water pressure!

This post's theme word is spuddle (v intr), "to work feebly". Through gradual work, the water will spuddle until it is level.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store

Keigo Higashino's The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is an odd novel, and one that came recommended by a friend and without any other context (I think I was told "it's very famous and popular in Japan" and "I think you'll like it"). I would not have found it on my own, but it is a perfect little self-contained dumpling of a novel.

The novel centers on the titular general store, whose proprietor accepts letters asking for advice; some replies are posted in the front window, and some are left for private pickup and review in the back of the store. The letters start as lighthearted pranks from local schoolkids but in the course of the novel we see a wide variety of people, in moments of vulnerability, turn to a stranger for advice. And the advice is mixed! Sometimes good, sometimes bad, always trying to meet them where they are.

What struck me reading this book was the subtle ways that it became clear that the cultural expectations were not what I expected. Whether because of the author's background, the setting, or the writing style, people kept being set up for climactic scenes or decisions and then... juddering to a different point. Sometimes I thought one path was clearly signaled and the characters (and narration!) didn't even seem to think it was possible; other times, something momentous happened out of nowhere. Conversations careened in ways I didn't understand; characters made silent assumptions about each other that I didn't have access to. It was a curious experience.

Overall the book was good, quite varied in its stories and never predictable. Is this modern fiction? Fantasy? Magical realism? I didn't know what to expect, the plot didn't follow any threads for too long so no one person was actually the focus, and incidental characters were shifted into and out of the spotlight all the time. It was tied up in a tidy way, but not a happy ending.

I liked it.

This post's theme word is alterity (n), "otherness; the quality or state of being other or different." The stories were interwoven with each other in a style that highlighted their similarities explicitly and left the overall alterity for the reader to find.

Uninhabited

 It's a pandemic and we've sent away the few students who were here. This is campus but looks as empty as a golf course.

This post's theme word is kapu (n), "taboo" (Hawaiian root). Even hanging out on the lawn is kapu in pandemic summer.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

Great texture

 The curb-to-sidewalk verge has a fantastic texture!

This post's theme word is marsescence (n), "the retention of dead leaves, etc., instead of shedding." Some weeds favor marsescence but it's not evidenced in springtime photos of fresh growth.

Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red is the first in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2018. It is a first-person account of a human-robot construct which is tasked with corporate security on an exploration mission to a new planet. It's quick and short, and the fun parts are:

• the story is told in the first person from a point of view which includes interfacing with drone cameras and so is much broader and more comprehensive than a usual human, BUT which also occasionally glitches or shuts down
• the internal monologue voice is dry and a little sarcastic, but the vocalized speech is all pretty straightforward --- this contrast was very satisfying
• on the second read, I noticed that the narration was impeccable about the Murderbot both not having a name and not having a gender; this was done so smoothly that on first read I had mentally pictured Murderbot as a woman (I guess because it was first person and that's how I perceive myself)

There's a ton of delight to be had in closely examining the story in retrospect --- it is essentially an entire narrative centered on the narrator's feelings, emotional state, expression of sentiment, and social cues like body language, but in a "doth protest too much, methinks" way, the narrator's main focus is persistently to avoid feeling or engaging with any emotion. (Multiple scenes include the lowering of an opaque visor or the narrator moving to stand facing the corner mid-conversation.) It's very well-crafted, to be a sneaky story about feelings which constantly mentions how feelings aren't there and shouldn't be acknowledged and could we please just focus on not all getting killed?

I picked it up again as a palate cleanser and enjoyed it; there are many more in this series, all queued up in my library.

This post's theme word is pensum (n), "a task, especially given as punishment." The ability to self-edit and control administrative privileges removes the threat of pensums.

Some retroblogged posts

I often want to date my post the date that I had the experience/thought/whatever, but I don't actually get around to making the post until later. Sometimes much later...

Recent new-old posts that you might have not seen because even RSS feeds don't pick 'em up:

Thank you class of 2020

Musée de Cluny

Poesy the Monster Slayer

Doppelgänger

Yes, I'm wildly abusing the format but since the main reader of this blog is me it's ... fine. Self-indulgent public posting is the name of the modern game and I'm doing it in my own way. I also have books, so many books, to write about --- with posts in various states of drafting and editing --- probably about one or two a week. For the past two years at least. Are they posted? Mostly not. Will they ever be? It depends on how much dopamine I dispense to myself for finally pushing that "publish" button.

And of course more books are arriving regularly here... I have not ordered any new books in more than a month, but the mail delays, backorders, and long-ago pre-orders mean that I have easily a full year's worth of reading already in headed my way, plus a house full of books that deserve first- and nth-readings.

extremely relatable content by Tom Gauld

This post's theme word is silvicolous (adj), "living or growing in the woods." Silvicolous libraries could be locally-sourced!

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It

K. J. Parker's How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It is the sequel to Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and begins approximately 10 seconds after the previous book ends.

Ok, maybe more like seven years? But we get enough flashbacks with our shiny, new unreliable narrator, that it is possible for the reader to piece together the continuous storyline of what has happened in the empire --- now reduced to a single walled city --- since the first book.

This book's narrator is an actor/playwright who, in the opening chapter, pitches a play wherein a nobody gets poached off the street by "the lord high chamberlain and the grand vizier. In disguise, of course. ...And they point out that the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the king. ... And it turns out that the king's been abducted by traitors in the pay of the enemy, who want to start a war, so we need you to pretend to be him" (p. 1-2). This is an incredibly bold move! -- to open a book with a Chekov's screenplay so heavily foreshadowing that it seemed like I might require the attention of a head trauma specialist. The snide narrator, of course, does this all with a wink-to-camera so big that he probably required an optometrist visit afterwards, all while waving and dancing and screaming "I am an unreliable narrator!" What a way to start a novel, ending chapter 1 with a sneering summary of plot points to make a story marketable:

Virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. I have to confess I'm no scholar, so for all I know there may be unicorns, in Permia or somewhere lie that, so maybe one component of that list does actually exist in real life. Wouldn't like to  bet the rent on it, though. (p 3)

I found this fun and absolutely in the style of the previous book, except that for some reason I liked this unreliable narrator more than that one. Maybe it was the incredible boldness of starting with such an obvious completely-unhidden augury that I actually wondered if all those things would come true, and which would be subverted, by the end --- would there be a unicorn? Maybe as a metaphor? Maybe as a prop?

The house was easy to recognize, because some clown with an unfortunate money-to-taste ratio had thought twin gateposts in the form of winged horses was a good idea. (p 32)

I liked this hint of unicorn-y-ness and the phrase "unfortunate money-to-taste ratio".

There was a ring of authenticity in the actor-narrator's reflection "I'm being him, which I can do as easily as I am me --- which isn't exactly easy in any realistic sense of the word. Because being me has never been easy. and on balance I'd far rather be anybody else but me." (p 51)

And there was an aching bruised feeling to the summary "I looked for just such a plan. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, or maybe it's top secret. Or maybe --- It slowly dawned on me that it's possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and  not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can't figure out the politics, or they think it'll be horrendously unpopular, or it'll cost too much money, a commodity you can't take with you..." (p 77)

Overall I liked this book better than the previous one, although the two narrator characters were basically identical in attitude and tone. I enjoyed that book 2 started by immediately disavowing the entirety of book 1 and even calling into question whether the narrator in book 1 even existed. My main negative about this book was that it tried to have so many twists that it twisted itself up, and the solution that was obvious from early in the book --- that one solution that would completely resolve all the plot conflicts --- was just ignored in favor of weird oblique strategies-with-a-twist!, as if this were some sort of Oceans-Eleven-style caper. It's not. So the final book resolution was the thing that had seemed obvious from the start, and I did not believe that the smart characters were surprised, because even I, with the limited information made available by the unreliable and manipulative narrator, was able to anticipate the conclusion.

It was diverting, and the cover art is great! Weirdly, book 1's cover is velvety but book 2's cover is crisp, even though I got matching editions.

This post's theme word is annelidous (adj), "of or relating to worms." There is an annelidous sequence of undermining, counter-undermining, contra-counter-undermining, and Bitter-Butter-Battle-style tunneling in this book about a besieged walled city. 

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City

K. J. Parker's Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City is a low-fantasy swirl of sardonic, unreliable narration. It is told in the style of direct address, with the narrator in full acknowledgement of his readership audience and historical context; it tells the story of how a lowly ethnic-minority army engineer lied, cheated, manipulated the bureaucracy, and used commonsense engineering-brain to protect the capital city from complete obliteration.

The narrative style was clever and comforting, but after about three chapters which end with a twist or cliffhanger, I came to expect it. This undermined my enjoyment of the unreliable narration, since it was easy to make the assumption "some stuff is lies and the rest is obscured to make a dramatic reveal later" in every chapter and always, always be correct. In the end it answered lots of questions and didn't leave me with much to mull over.

The very clever and self-contradicting narrator, in a style of direct address, the preface and addendum notes that directly disavow the historicity of the contents of the narration (it's a low-fantasy medieval walled city of no particular resemblance to anything), all the snide to-camera comments making fun of personalities around him... all these are elements which I enjoy, but overall the book didn't capture me and I found myself thinking wistfully of how excellent A Deadly Education was. This book doesn't seem like it will stick with me, but it was fun.

We've been ingenious, resourceful and inventive, and we haven't let ourselves be hindered by outmoded or irrelevant ways of thinking. It's a shame, really, because nobody will ever know how clever we were. (p 113)

This post's theme word is propugnaculum (n), "a fortress; defense; protection". The trained defense soldiers and maintenance workers are a vital part of your walled city's propugnaculum; in this case, the public gardeners! 

P.S. Every time I catch the title of this book out of the corner of my eye, it triggers my subconscious and "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover" starts playing in my head. I had been idly humming it to myself for days before realizing that this book was the cause.