/project/multiplexer
Ramblings in a State of Insanity
[Game Review] The Esoterrorists
0“The Esoterrorists” by Robin D. Laws from Pelgrane Presss.
I picked up the Esoterrorists from the IPR booth at PAX East. It is a surprisingly slim, non-pretentious volume at 88 pages. It was also the first dead-tree game I have bought for a while, as all my purchases lately have been PDFs through various outlets and read on my iPad.
I was aware of GUMSHOE* because I read Robin Law’s livejournal daily. He posts occasional updates, hints, or little drabbles that don’t make it into books; the link is above and can be added to an RSS reader. I have also made most of my way through his newest book, “Hamlet’s Hit Points” which discusses emotional beats.
I tend to think of Robin Laws written games like Feng Shui and Dying Earth as these tiny, compressed awesome gems of indie games who syphon off the best ideas from the raging community and presents them with clean, easy to comprehend rules that guarantees, at minimum, a very strange gaming experience. I do love them, and I am far from alone.
I read this one cover to cover, so my thoughts…
What the heck is this thing?
It’s a horror gaming system with a thin veneer of setting laid over the top. For many years, those of us who love horror have gone back and forth on the best way to play and run a horror game. The old Call of Cthulhu 5th edition system was the ANSI Standard for Horror Systems**. Sure there was a CoC 6th edition and a CoC d20 and a CoC worn as a hat and a myriad of other horror games of all shapes and sizes and levels of awesomeness and Changlingness. And there was KULT, a Very Special Game. When we talk about horror gaming, we’re talking about CoC 5th edition as a base state and sort of working from there.
The problem with CoC 5th edition is it uses this crappy wargaming system where a single botched roll can bring an entire adventure to a screaming halt. This is terrible. Horror games are games of discovery. Otherwise, how do the characters find the horror? If they’re too dumb to miss it, they’ll never be horrified!*** GUMSHOE attempts to address this core problem in horror gaming… with a very simple system that assumes all investigative rolls succeed automatically.
It’s clever. It works. It fixes the issue. But…
The Overall Package (Organization, Presentation, Readability):
In the days of expensive, glossy, full-color artwork in RPGs, the Esoterrorists feels a little old school with its black and white pages and its sparse layout. Perusing the tables at PAX East, it felt like every book was this full color loving work of art. Esoterrists is back to the 90s.
But it didn’t seem to impede the reading of the text. The text is laid out single width with generous margins, so even the 88 pages of book feels less than 88 pages. A little thread of ascerbic sarcasm runs through the book and its a joy. Yes, this is horror, and yes, everyone is going to die, but that’s okay — here’s a hack to get the next set of chararcters in the mix so the story can go on! Yay! And a bullshit detector skill! Everyone needs one of those!
I’m not knocking a non-glossy-hollywood production here because the text is fantastic and readable. It’s good stuff.
The Setting:
And here is where the Esoterrorists falls down. The book sort of kind of has a setting. You’re in a super secret black ops group and there are bad guys called the Esoterrorists and they do bad things. You need to stop them.
And that’s about all you get. Granted, for the nitpickers out there, the book has 4 monsters. No real stats or anything. But they have pictures! Kind of.
So that’s that.
(Yes, I know there are now supplements that fleshes out the Esoterrorists and books of monsters and all that good stuff. But still.)
The Rules:
GUMSHOE is a cool system and I found, as I read through it, I like it alot because it is so dead simple. Each character has a set of investigative skills. These never fail. Then the character has a set of more physical and mental skills (SAN is swapped for STABLIITY but it is still SAN) that the character can and will fail. Players have pools. They roll a single d6 against the target. Make it, things are good. Fail it, things are bad.
The system is like thus:
- In doing an investigation, if the character has the right skill and says they are using the skill, it works! Yay! Tossing in a few pool points may make it succeed extra awesomely.
- In doing stuntly things, the GM sets a target. The characters can toss in from their die pools. They can work together. They can support actions. Someone rolls a d6. Points are added together. Either it works or it doesn’t.
There you go, you’re playing the GUMSHOE system. The book does flesh out all the special cases and how to handle health and sanity and those important bits but that, right there, is the core.
Various Bits of Awesome:
I want to call out the adventure at the end of the book. I normally skip adventures at the end of books but it was a full 1/3rd of the book so I felt I should read it. I’m glad I did because it’s amazing.
The investigators start with a ritual murder in a downtown DC and use it to follow a black ops gone bad and people being grabbed and sent to the Dominican Republic for sacrifice and a little cannibalism. I don’t want to spoil the adventure but I want to call out some bits:
- It walks through how to put together a great investigative plot.
- It shows how to make the assumptions that characters will get the clues.
- It also demonstrates the right places to use physical tests.
- The adventure is nicely paced so the horror is contained to the reveal at the very end.
- It’s excellently written and worth the read in general for “how to write a cool adventure.”
Wrapping up my thoughts:
The Esoterrorists is worth the $10 to download it as a PDF. GUMSHOE is a good idea with more good ideas that solves a clear issue: how does one do procedural investigations in an RPG that don’t hang on every die roll succeeding?
I knock it hard because it needs other supplementary material to make this game a full boy. Very rarely do I want more pages in an RPG. Normally they feel overstuffed and bloated from trying to make an esoteric pagecount. NPCs who don’t need to be there, an extra adventure, whathaveyou. This time, I dearly wished for more monsters, more GMing advice, and simply more stuff about the setting. Since the core book came out, several books of supplementary material have been released to flesh out the setting. But it feels a little bait-and-switchy and I would have been happy with a 128 page core book with all the material rather than an 88 page book with extra books to buy.
If you are interested in the GUMSHOE system, by all means, buy it. For me, reading the Esoterrorists has made me want to read Trail of Cthulhu very badly; and that is the next RPG teed up for me to consume because Cthulhu does not lack for setting and the idea of a Cthulhu where people could actually play out a story? Yeah, awesome.
Overall: a 3.5 stars out of 5
* Also, GUMSHOE is the system in Trail of Cthulhu which is a slightly different discussion.
** NIST has lots of time to set standards, you see.
*** This is the CoC Dumb Trackstar hack.
The Grognard Faces Down XCode
010 months ago
by zenith
in technology
My favorite term these days is grognard. I am misusing it terribly, no doubt. But I like this word. It’s evocative. It’s more polite than neckbeard, but only slightly; grognard has a gutteral sound in the back of the throat that makes it a bit more worldly-sounding.
This leads into a technical discussion of sorts. I am trying to learn iPad programming (I will no doubt talk about it at length as I puzzle it out and get things working) and this means moving out of my rather enormous comfort zone and into somewhere new. I’m a UNIX grognard. I haven’t written any Linux kernel mode drivers* but if something needs to be done on Linux or a UNIX variant I’ve probably done it, boostrapped it, duct taped it, or otherwise shouted at it really super loudly.
When I cracked out the books I let loose a mocking laugh for lo, everything started with “NS” for “NeXTStep” and we all know where we are with NeXT. Yeah we know where we are — lost. I work in a text-mode universe** and all the sudden I had… tools… that generate… code… and do… things. And it all mocks me from its NeXTStep past!
I downloaded Xcode 4 and got it all set up and running and was instantly lost in a maze of twisty passages all alike. Swearing happened. So did the throwing of the book. Here I am in a very familiar universe of gcc and gdb and Unix-mode tools and a completely weird world of clicking and dragging and things that refactor code by somewhat magic and, uh, stuff.
I don’t… do… stuff.
I was weirded out.
Two days — two full days for someone who cut C on a mainframe — before popping up a window, creating some controls, generating a class, and having it display “Hello World.” Look! Something approximating success!
It’s kind of funny how things that are old are new again. NeXT. Smalltalk in its cunning disguise as “Objective-C.” Low-level C hacking. Hand-coding memory management. GCC tricks. Trying to fit a ton of code in a very small place. It is all wrapped in a little tiny happy graphical shell.
I have reached grognard. And I have faced down XCode. And I am fairly certain it has won.
* Yet.
** I am occasionally okay with Eclipse but even when working in Java I find it annoys me enough to go back to the text mode universe. The only non-nano/vim universe I have ever liked is TextMate for MacOSX. I am, in fact, writing this post in gedit on Ubuntu which is a half step above “putting HEX into memory.”
Knitting is Nerdier than RPGs
8I sort of have this long-running argument with myself: What, precisely, is nerdier than RPGs? I have used RPGs* as the ANSI Standard for Nerd for a long time. It’s not so much that it’s fantasy or science fiction and people sitting in a basement pretending to do fantasy and science-fiction things as much as the sheer pointless bookkeeping. Books and stats and monsters and endless rules discussions down to hyper minute.
Now a days, RPGs have taken a step away from that nerdy brink. The rulesets are getting cleaner, the adoption getting wider, and zillions of people play them online in MMORPGs. Popular RPGs are based on even more popular mass media. Even the uninitiated no longer finds that hand of Satan, D&D, to be frightening any more. After all, the ruleset has been streamlined into the core of kill things and take stuff to the point where it is reduced on convenient character class cards.
I began to reposition myself to the definition of ANSI Standard for Nerd (much like NIST I must, about once a decade, revisit my published definitions) and began to settle on a deeper, more grognard activity: Fantasy Baseball. I cannot even begin to fathom the depths of Fantasy Baseball. I can only admire its shining contours: the many websites, the pages of statistics, the arguments over pitching styles, the battle.** I was content that Fantasy Baseball encompassed the dark beer-spilled smells of deep blackness of the Internet forum while RPGs crawled forth from the sewers and burst into mainstream heralded by Big Bang Theory on Prime Time.
Then I hit the dehaired llama yarn review.
Okay, so. It is not enough to shave a llama and make a sweater from its hair. No, one must first shave a llama, harvest its delicious undercoat (and perhaps its meaty brain pods) and then fuse the delicious undercoat with strains of cotton grown on a certain plantation during a certain time of the year to blend to create just the right softness to use in that single skein that cannot produce even a full pair of socks. And the hair must be knitted with just the right steel — not wood, as wood will catch — needles of the tiniest width to create a garment just so. And for added goodness we’re going to throw in strange beasts called cables which no one quite understands except for the cabal that lives in the basement among their walls of books and gear and who cackle in the night and then launch themselves upon internet BBSs to argue for the greatness of the dehaired llama who is, by this time, really cold. This isn’t a hobby — this is a plot of a neo-post-Lovecraftian horror story wherein the dehaired llama hair with cotton blend is used to break through the ether that separates the line between reality and a composite reality full of awesome.
And when knitters come together knitters speak a strange language of nuance and jumbled letters and comments incomprehensible by those on the outside. They squat among their piles of books full of arcane languages of fibers and fibercraft and spinning and dyes and needles and hooks and techniques and stitches all to make, in the end, probably nothing because, much like RPGs, if the pattern is boring it is abandoned for the newer, the stranger, the front page of this season’s Vogue Knitting.
After a year of concentrated researcher and thought, I now can follow the basic flow of conversation on a single knitting forum. And even then! After the initiation of correctly executing a heel turn, even then I can only follow the basic contours! I dare not post to be exposed as… still… a mere newbie.
Much like RPG stores, knitting stores have their own bizarre personalities. Their own lines of yarn, lines of tools, locals who hang out on the couches day in and day out and knit (often the same sock over and over), who either APPROVE of your knitting style or DISAPPROVE of your knitting style and will FROWN at you until you flee with a new book and a skein in hand. Either you pass through the initiation of walking through the door or you do not; but what you never do is ask after crochet because the end of that road lies only doom.
I have been told Quilting is a deeper abyss than even knitting. Quilters are mad, they tell me. They roam the landscape in herds going to shows and symposiums and seek out quilting shops full of odd machines and strange bolts of fabric. I lower quilters below the ANSI Standard — they are beyond comprehension, even beyond dehaired llamas and Fantasy Baseball and even the odd Traveler campaign.
Frankly, I think I own about par of knitting “gear” (skeins, books, bags of tools) as I do gaming “gear.” They both take up about the same amount of space (a shelf on a bookcase, a big basket of stuff under a table) physically and mentally. And I find it about the same talking knitting and gaming — often to the same audience.
But whenever someone tells me gaming is nerdy, I flip through a knitting magazine and say… “If you think so, you should see some of this.”
* Role playing games, not Rocket Propelled Grenades. Although Rocket Propelled Grenades are pretty nerdy, too!
** “It’s all about the battle.” — Sports Night
Libya
0I am having difficulty forming a coherent and useful opinion on what the US is doing with the UK and France in Libya. I have purposefully kept myself confined to facts and stayed away from opinion but I still can’t really get my mind around it.
On the one hand, enormous massacres of civilian populations by heavily armed militaries defending insane dictators are generally a bad thing from a human rights perspective. Especially when these massacres are broadcast on TV. This creates pressure to “do something.”
On the other hand, I have two major objections. The first is that this isn’t really clear that bombing Libya does anything to further US interests. I am certain it is important from an oil perspective but it’s unclear it is as important as, say, the mess in Yemen or the Saudis invading Bahrain to stop the protests or the rapid militarization of the Iranian government. Second: I have never believed that freedom can be given. I have always believed that it must be earned, even if it means horrible things happen without outside intervention. Freedom forced upon a people from without is just another word for oligarchy.
So what does the US involving itself in a Civil War between a brutal dictator and a bunch of people holing up in several towns with guns in Northern Africa do? I just don’t have a great answer. I’m not sure what the goal is.
I suspect there is no correct answer to Libya. Either you stand by and do nothing and watch the atrocity and listen as people scream that you do something (that ‘something’ being highly undefined) or you ‘do something’ and everyone screams that doing something isn’t the right thing/isn’t good enough/is too interventionist/isn’t interventionist enough. You half do something like firing missiles off submarines and that’s too much/not enough.
And after writing this small blurb on it I realize that there is no answer, it’s a crappy situation, and no matter what happens people who bear no responsibility for the decision are going to sit around and crow and point fingers and scream that so-and-so should do this/not do this/is weak/etc. I find I am personally not crazy about the decision to start bombing the place because either the locals oust Qaddafi or not and find their own way or not. At the end of the day, the locals have to live there tomorrow. It’s their home. And we get to change the channel.
PAX East 2011
011 months ago
PAX East 2011 was awesome.
I have a handy comparison of con styles on hand. I just attended the RSA Conference 2011. I dearly loved RSA but it was a death march. Up at 6am, slog through the rain, be there by 8-8:15am, try to hit as many talks and keynotes and paper presentations as possible, cram in visiting booths and talking to relevant vendors, try to socialize, maybe eat in there somewhere. Do something eveningish, collapse, rinse, repeat. It was a great experience but dear God it was painful.
PAX East is the antithesis of the track-and-talk-and-demonstration-based conventions. It has no real set schedule. Instead it has a huge number of things to do. Want to attend a talk? There are talks. Want to go to an evening concert? There are super cool evening concerts.* Want to play a game? What kind? Many companies run tabletop and boardgame full demos. You can check boardgames out of the library. The console freeplay rooms were huge this year for those looking to play an XBox or 360 game. There was Rock Band and Dance Central. The EXPO floor was enormous and full of playable demos and swag. I really enjoy the loose, not really terribly planned nature of PAX East. It doesn’t feel like a convention. It feels like a huge party where 65,000 of your best friends show up to talk about games and play games and generally hang out together in the bonding of love over all things games.
And this year we spent PAX East meeting new people. My twitter follow list exploded. We had great talks over in the RPG area. We played board games. We played the Leverage RPG. We went to dinner with new people and had a great time. This is what I loved this year: the socialization. Gaming people! Comic book people! Random Internet famous people! We went to only one talk, and it was on Geek Parenting. We were interviewed for a documentary as geek parents. We watched the Old Republic trailer. I played Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in the console freeplay room until my hand nearly fell off — and then found the Gauntlet upright and that had to be played. It was a moral imperative.
Save one detail,** the move to the bigger conference center was a massive upgrade. No more crowding in the hallways trying to get somewhere. The EXPO area was cavernous. I’m still not certain we saw everything there — but we saw lots and lots of cool stuff. The tabletop area, crammed into a few small rooms last year, was huge with lots and lots and lots of tables. It even had halfway decent con food that didn’t kill any of us. We even liked the hotel.
I could pick it apart day by day and item by item, and may do so, but suffice to say right now: PAX East is huge fun and highly recommended for anyone who can get themselves to Boston.
We’re totally going next year. April 7-9th. Be there.
* We did the concerts last year to the exclusion of many other things so we did the other things this year.
** Not enough beanbags to crash in.
Review: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
0
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Nothing to Envy" is the most depressing book in the world.
Following the lives of six ex-pat North Koreans who, through luck and perseverance, managed to get out through China and to South Korea (where they are automatically citizens), "Nothing to Envy" chronicles the rise and fall of the last Soviet Communist State who has managed, somehow, to hang on when dictators world over are falling. At first, Kim Il-Jong’s make-believe Communist Paradise, established in 1958 and propped up by the Russians, looked like a Korean Miracle. Built on top of left behind Japanese trains, electrical lines, factories, and roads, the Communist experiment looked, from the outside, to actually work: the per capita of those in North Korea was higher than South Korea as South Korea went through its post-Korean War growing pangs. Sure everyone in North Korea was pigeon-holed based on the allegiances of their grandparents and their opportunities in life granted or removed based on some superficial caste almost as harsh as found in India, but the people were fed, everyone had health care, people had jobs and school, and the trains ran on time.
Then three things happened: the Soviet Union fell, Kim Il-Jong died, and Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms in China caused China’s economy to rapidly expand. North Korea never was anything more than a puppet state; it never made or sold anything itself. The moment the money dried up and North Korea’s allies became more interested in money than a Communist experiment, North Korea began to starve. Everyone starved. Hundreds of thousands died. And the government never relented to feed its people, all for ideology.
The six very personal stories chronicles the period of intense starvation and the re-discovery of capitalist markets in North Korea from 1991 to the present day. All of the people featured in the book, some young and some old enough to remember the Korean War, are all survivors, tough enough to survive the famines, cross the border into China, and sneak all the way to South Korea. "Nothing to Envy" chronicles extreme poverty under crushing 1984 conditions where, even while starving, a stray word against the government meant a trip to the Gulag. Televisions are fixed to only one TV station, radios only get the North Korean State station (but easy to hack), cellphones banned, no computers, and the people are sealed in a hermetic bubble. It doesn’t matter, though: electricity is so rare people steal the copper out of the power lines to sell for black market rice. The electricity hasn’t been on in twenty years. Cities crumble, trains die on the tracks, and the factories sit idle. There aren’t any cars. North Korea is a wasteland.
After reading this book, it’s unclear how reunification would work. North Korea is a poverty-stricken nation stuck in the 1960s and reunification would mean retraining some 23 million people in how to exist in the 21st century. Estimates are between $800 billion and $1.3 trillion to rebuild North Korea to a livable, workable standard. It’s not the de-brainwashing as much as the sheer rebuilding.
"Nothing to Envy" is a very sad book about a very sad place run by a madman who would rather his country be ideologically pure than his people eat. It’s unlikely North Korea will survive another change of hands considering how China is leaking in over the northern border and running North Korea’s black markets — the only source of food they have. But when it does happen, it will be a real mess. North Korea is a humanitarian disaster.
Recommended for anyone interested in what life is like in North Korea.
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It’s About the CDOs
3Pension plan management is traditionally a very dull job. A huge group of people in a big corporation or a union contribute a chunk of their* monthly paychecks into the collected pension fund where a normally 3rd party company manages the contributes and tries to make them grow more than the rate of current inflation to ensure a fund is viable for future retirees. Traditionally, the managing companies put this money into blue chip funds and treasury bills. It was not an exciting job but there are many Big Pools of Money.
But in the 2002, 2003 time frame, this changed. Surely by now you have all gone and listened to the Planet Money archives, you have listened to the Giant Pool of Money show from This American Life and you even read Michael Lewis’s the Big Short. Money manager for pension funds received bonuses for growing pension plans over the rate of inflation and Wall Street had brand, swanky new cannot-fail products to sell for big fees. First they sold mortgage backed securities and when all the mortgages there were disappeared the junk left behind was sliced and diced into Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). Who bought all this crap? State pension fund managers. Obviously someone bought all this garbage — otherwise no one was making any money off sales.
In 2007, the market crashed and the pension fund managers were left with huge amounts of the pension plans being zeroed out. The states were contractually obligated to be on the hook to cover the pension funds mismanaged by their third party fund managers. The Obama Administration swooped in, passed a stimulus, and gave giant block grants to the states to help them meet their obligations. This bought the states a couple of years.
It’s pretty straight forward. State unions entrusted the management of their pension plans to the state to manage. The state outsourced it to a company that bought the Wall Street line of fast, easy money. The market crashed. The money taken from the State unions went *poof*. Now the states have, instead of firing the money managers and pressing the Federal Government to force regulations to protect their future obligations, decided to Union-bust. Which is ridiculous policy.
What galls me most about what is going on in Wisconsin are the lies. The argument is essentially this:
“We have a multi-decade agreement in place with our workers to assist in their retirement that they pay into. We lost it all gambling. But we love gambling on exotic bond instruments we don’t understand so very much we have decided gamble more and fire them all! Aren’t we great civil servants?”
Why not tell people the truth? The state lost the money on a shell game. The money managers were trying to make big bonuses and lost the whole fund investing in crappy developments in Florida. The state has contractual obligations and has to make up the shortfall because that’s how legally these things work. So that means either the unions have to take some kind of cut until the pension plan is repaid in full or the revenue will have to be raised. The holes were somewhat covered by the stimulus but with the Republicans in charge and no second round of stimulus, there’s going to be a change and it will have to come in the form of a raise in gas tax/sin tax/etc. Oh, also, we have new money managers. It’s their fault, they need to own up, and come up with a solution.
But no. “UNIONS ARE EVIL ALL MUST DIE DIE DIE.” In this day in age, our politicians don’t have the balls to tell the simple truth. Instead they grandstand. I would pay good money for a single politician who could be bothered to read a damn newspaper or understand the problem.
It might have helped if the Obama Administration could explain anything they do to people but that is, as they say, another story.
* Yes, theirs.
Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
0
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What do I say about this book?
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest the Return of the King of exceedingly trashy thriller novels. Conspiracy! Fraud! Illegal Wire Tapping! Chase scenes! More chase scenes! Good cops! Bad cops! Evil cops! Hacking! Hot heroic women! And, of course… MURDER. Oh, and don’t forget the sex, the yugoslavian mafia guys, the biker gangs, the evil government officials, and the Heroics of Mikhael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander and the Millennium crew! When I say "trashy" I don’t mean it in a bad way. Trashy is good. Trashy is often great! But art it is not and boy is this novel trashy. It transcends cheese and right out the other side into glorious, glorious trash.
The story is 600 pages of chase novel. It opens with Lisbeth Salander in the hospital after being shot in the head (!!) and then the quest to clear her of All Wrongs and her eeeevil father, the ex-Soviet military spy and defector to Sweden, just down the hall plotting her horrible demise. Meanwhile, a super secret government group called the Section comes out of retirement to deal with their wayward spy, cover all their tracks, destroy Millennium before evidence is published, and bury Lisbeth Salander forever in a mental institution. No one is going to keep Mikhael Blomqvist from getting the story — and along the way a girl — about something as scandalous as a bunch of old Cold Warriors who will do anything to keep an old Soviet Spy who has moved into sex trafficking a secret.
And then everyone runs all over Sweden — except Lisbeth, who spends 80% of the novel lying in bed in a hospital hacking. The Girl who Kicks the Hornet’s Nest is the book where Stieg Larsson figured out how to write. The scenes are short and breathless. The chapters are laid out day by day so while Horrible Things happen one day you just have to know what happens on the next. Despite having an enormous cast, the plot moves along at breakneck pace. It’s a fun read! And surprisingly, fairly well plotted.
Most of Lisbeth’s hacking actually manages to pass the smell test. It’s a little exaggerated in places simply through time compression but otherwise its likely plausible enough. My only true quibble with this book is the Erika Berger B plot which seems to serve no purpose other than for Erika to leave, run around, whine, and then return to Millennium older and wiser and having learned a Valuable Lesson. Perhaps I simply do not like the Erika Berger character, but I found the B plot to be a little tedious and pointless. Otherwise, I enjoyed most of the second fiddle characters — the Milton Security guys (and gal), the Constitutional Protection Police in SIS, the regular cops, and, overall, the bad guys who, to their credit, are immensely bad.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest firmly earns its 5 star rating by bringing the story to a complete conclusion. The very end is a tad rushed but it ends. The trilogy concludes. I feel comfortable walking away from Lisbeth Salander and Mikhael Blomqvist and all their friends and enemies. The story has been told.
I feel comfortable recommending the series after the conclusion of the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I know, you’re probably looking at the books and going: "Man, these books are everywhere. Should I really read them?" My answer: yep. The third book is all payoff, baby.
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The Route to Nirvana
011 months ago
by zenith
in technology
I don’t believe this has to be said but I have discovered that it has to be said:
If you are hosting a huge party for a whole bunch of random people, you should have your DJs mix up 80s pop music, preferably 80s top 40. Sure, playing the newest techno and trance out of Ibiza is hot and edgy and cyberpunky, and I openly admit I own some of said newest techno and trance from the clubs in Ibiza, but no one is going to dance. What is the point of having a dance floor when no one is going to dance to the throbbing techno? Geeks don’t pack Ecstasy and they don’t flop around to Gabriel and Dresden, but I guarantee they know the words to Bon Jovi songs. Everyone who owns Rock Band knows the words to Bon Jovi songs!
This is the Route to Nirvana. Even off Nevermind.
Come on, guys. This is the secret to the success of Glee. The hits of the 80s. And Queen. Some Bowie. It should be obvious.
I just had to get that off my chest. I thought it was clear to all and sundry but apparently it needs to be said.
Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire
2
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"The Girl who Played with Fire" has middle book of a trilogy syndrome. It doesn’t have all the setup and introductions and background and exploration of character that the first book has and it doesn’t have the resolution of a final book. It is the Empire Strikes Back of the Millennium Trilogy — neither an opener nor a closer, but with plenty of "I am your father, Luke" moments. This leaves the book feeling a little bit at loose ends.
My biggest issue with "The Girl who Played with Fire" is that nothing of plot consequence happens for the first full third of the book. It opens with a big "meanwhile" where Lisbeth Salandar does stuff for a while and Mikhael Blomqvist does stuff for a while and the magazine does stuff for a while and really, people do stuff for a while. There’s some good old fashioned lesbian sex, some regular straight sex, and lots of people sitting around drinking and talking. Then people get shot up real good and blood splatters and the book becomes enjoyable. We demand blood splatters! Give us dead bodies or go home!
The book tosses in characters who are so numerous it gets hard to follow after a while: cops, bikers, a professional boxer, the staff at Millennium magazine, the people at Milton Security, some dude named Zala, a big blond giant who goes around hitting people with his fists, government flunkies… and they all have names that end in "… berg." It becomes an exercise in being cross-eyed after a while. The story becomes /super/ exciting when it involves Lisbeth Salandar (our autistic heroine) or Mikael Blomqvist (our intrepid reporter) but then stalls a bit when it flashes to this secondary character or that secondary character. Well, I guess those characters need to have lives, too. Then there are fights — one thing I can say about Stieg Larsson books is the guy knew how to write an exciting fight scene — and implacable villains who are implacable and villainous and an absolutely amazing final 10% of the book full of, to put it bluntly, Empire Strikes Back moments with Big! Gasping! Revelations! GASP! Read that passage again! GASP!!!!
Except Lisbeth Salander gets to keep her hand. Sort of.
For the final 10% I bumped my review from three stars to four simply because the payoff is worth the slog at the beginning. For the most part, "The Girl who Played with Fire" is a three and a half star book. It plods in the beginning and bogs in places where the cops run around coming to incorrect conclusions. It is not as tightly plotted or as cleanly written as "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." It isn’t as enjoyably trashy, either — sure, it has a lesbian sex scene but it is a bit on the tame side and Blomqvist doesn’t sleep with /everyone/. It is trashy, sure, but it is not quite as trashy as the first book. In places it even feels a little conservative. The closing scenes, though, are worth the price of admission.
It also has no resolution. It’s a middle series book. No opening and no closing. Luckily one can get "the Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest" from Amazon and it downloads right to the Kindle…
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The Telegraph
0David Plotz on last week’s Slate Political Podcast quoted this section of Ulysses S Grant’s memoirs as a bit of random trivia. This quote is a minor reminder that in American politics all that is old is eventually new again and the same few arguments come up again and again. If the telegraph is such a world-changing marvel in 1885, what is the Internet?
“The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and do his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe. Rude machinery, propelled by water power, had been invented; sails to propel ships upon the waters had been set to catch the passing breeze—but the application of stream to propel vessels against both wind and current, and machinery to do all manner of work had not been thought of. The instantaneous transmission of messages around the world by means of electricity would probably at that day have been attributed to witchcraft or a league with the Devil. Immaterial circumstances had changed as greatly as material ones. We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated. The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.”
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs, Chapter XVI, Section 14
So You Think You Want a Revolution?
0Now we are edging to the world of meta:
Anderson Cooper Just Got Beat Up By Pro-Mubarak Thugs in Cairo.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and his camera crew were attacked and repeatedly punched by pro-government forces near Tahrir Square in Cairo today. “My team were set upon by the crowd,” Cooper said on CNN this morning via telephone from the safety of a hotel balcony. “There was no rhyme or reason to it—it was just people looking for a fight, looking to make a point, and punching us.” According to a Twitter post from George Hale, the English editor of the Ma’an news agency, who cited a CNN “manager,” Cooper was punched “10 times in the head.”
On Egypt
2I have seen on the Internets: “The Iraq War cost $3 trillion. We could have saved $2.99 trillion and given the rest to Al Jazeera to get the same net result.” I am not positive it’s a misplaced sentiment. Free and unfettered political speech combined with political corruption is a terribly powerful force for change.
What Happened in Egypt?
Food insecurity is at the root. Food prices have risen as much as 30% in much of the Middle East. When people live on $5 a day are faced with food insecurity, people riot. The root is right here in CNN.
In Egypt alone, food prices soared 17% — in part because of the worldwide surge in commodities prices but also because of local supply imbalances.
Egypt also has a recorded unemployment of ~9.5% but the real numbers are likely much harder.
Then there was the story of Khalid Said. Young businessman Khalid Said saw a drug deal go down between two corrupt policemen in Alexandria, caught the video on his cellphone, and uploaded it up to YouTube. The police came around and beat him to death. It was a year ago — but long enough for him to become a symbol.
And then there was January 25th, a date Hosni Mubarak put on the map for the very first time as “We Love the Secret Police Day.” No really.
Mix in Tunisia, Wikileaks, Facebook organization, a little bit of twitter, SMS, Al Jazeera, and *kerpow*
What Next?
Mubarak is playing the Iranian waiting game. He believes he can wait out the people in the streets by shutting down the banks, unleashing prisoners, destroying property, pulling the police out to allow mayhem, and terrorizing people with the military. But people with no jobs and no food have no where else better to be. And thus there is an impasse. It’s not even clear a Tienanmen Square-style massacre would disperse people at this point.
Perhaps Mubarak is simply waiting for the protesters to starve.
Either way, he is critically weakened as a strongman. He no longer has the backing of his people and his leverage is rapidly vaporizing.
On the other hand, Egypt has never had anything resembling a democracy. It’s unclear it can get there itself without some help. But, unlike lots of people who are wringing their hands, I’m sort of certain where there is a will there is a way and once people have a taste of lovely free speech and freedom to assemble and free press they have a hard time giving it back up. We’ll see.
Everyone is talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. If there were parliamentary elections in Egypt, they would take a number of seats. That is certain. Mubarak carefully terrorized and destroyed all of the secular political parties that might have threatened his reign but left the Brothers in a stunted state. They are the only ones with a political apparatus in place. The Wikipedia page isn’t bad. If they will be become crazies or if they will participate in the political process is to be seen.
The clear winner in all this is Al Jazeera. They have had a 2500% (yes, the number is right) growth in traffic to their site, most of it from the US. The servers came down for a while on Friday but donations and half the IT in Qatar is busy trying to keep them online. They’ve always been goofy but no goofier than our cable news — they just have a different point of view.
Review: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
0
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am of two minds about this book. Either:
* Everyone in the world should read this book
… or …
* No one should /ever/ read this book.
When The Big Short first came out, I heard about it on NPR, listened to a review on Planet Money, listened to an interview with Michael Lewis on Planet Money, heard several more people talk about this book, and then decided not to read it for ‘rage management’ reasons. Planet Money recently released their recommended books about the crash and the economy and, this time around, I felt enough time passed between the crash and now that the rage would be a lesser rage, that I would not throw my Kindle into the wall, and the teeth grinding would be lessened.
The Big Short is a concise history of Wall Street from 2003-2008. By following the lives, and trades, of several sets of investors who saw the crash coming from miles away, the book delves deeply into the world of mortgage backed securities. As well as anyone can, it explains bond trading, tranches, credit default swaps (CDS), collatoralized debt obligations (CDOs), and synthesized CDOs which are CDOs made, bewilderingly, of other CDOs. Then the book goes on to talk about the crazy trader at Deutsche Bank who ran around selling CDSes on everything, the bond trader group — who used to be equity traders — who went short on everything they could find, the doctor come hedge fund manager who fought endlessly to tell his investors that these no-doc, negative amortizing adjustable rate mortgages with 2 year teaser rates were going to blow up and they did not listen, the kids from Berkeley who tried to make a killing and the people who actually went long on these things.
The pinnacle of the book is the "Wing Chau" scene, where the equity trader met someone on the other side of his trades who, in 2006, when bonds were already going bad, was convinced of the status quo forever and ever. Then the equity trader went home going "oh my god…"
The game was rigged. In theory Americans would refinance every two years from one terrible mortgage to the next to generate endless fees to dump into endless bonds that pretended to be "riskless." In the end, the mortgage deals blew up and the huge bundles of bonds were not riskless. Housing did not increase in value forever.
And yes, the few people who saw it coming made hundreds of millions off the crash, but at what cost to society as a whole? Most of them left, never to return to the game. They made their money but the cost to themselves was so high it wasn’t worth it anymore.
It’s a story of massive collective delusion, of outright greed, of fraud, of lies, of gamed rating agencies, of banks shifting massive untold risk on to their shareholders, of normal banking becoming too ‘boring’, of an industry who sucked up trillions of dollars and produced nothing, and of people who were playing with things they had no hope of understanding. A story of a giant game played with people’s homes and people’s ignorance on a mass scale and turning the American homeowner into just one dot in a giant Ponzi Scheme that was bailed out, no questions asked, by the US Government with even more of the American homeowner’s money.
The book has an incredibly hooky style. It’s clear. It’s concise. It’s sarcastic. It’s entertaining. It’s compulsive. It reads quickly. It’s also a drive by on a twenty car accident on a freeway. I want desperately to recommend it but I feel everyone who reads this book will promptly sell their house, pull their money out of the banks, and go live on a compound somewhere in Western Michigan.
Seriously two thumbs up but now, when I read the economics blogs — all which recommend the Big Short — I am always going to think about one bond trader screaming at another one: "I’M SHORTING YOUR HOUSE!"
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Follow the Arab World Protests
0Egypt is melting down and it is an exceedingly big deal. The causes are complex, the people are angry, and as the Arab world’s most populous nation, it is a major strategic US and Israel ally. Not only that but somehow the entire country fell off the Online Map this morning — a fairly breathtaking technological feat.
Meanwhile protests continue also in Yemen and Jordan.
Instead of going on and on about it, here’s some useful links:
Al Jazeera’s Anger in Egypt — English Language, lots and lots and lots of clips, interviews, and analysis. Rumor has it that the Egyptian police raided the Al Jazeera offices in Cairo today…’
The Guardian has live updates.
Wired has a follow the Arab World Protests Online page.
Egypt’s Internet Shutdown Can’t Shut Down Massive Protests.
The Daily Show on the sources of unrest is spot on. Team W! Team O! Team Twitter!
Andrew Sullivan (over at the Atlantic) is doing a great job following everything going on with posts, links and clips.
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