mykola@

Warren Ellis’s new novel, Gun Machine, is about NYPD detective John Tallow who accidentally stumbles upon evidence of a serial killer so dangerous and so prolific that capturing him would close dozens of unsolved cases.

On the surface, this is a tale about office politics in a police department where everyone is just angry at the additional paperwork. Digging a bit deeper you find the story of a lonely guy trying - trying really hard, and for the first time in years - to stop living exclusively in his head, to give a shit about other people. And if you really pay attention, you’ll find that the value of this work - the real genius - has very little to do with the actual plot.

Warren Ellis’s genius lies in the way he writes about time.

A lot of really brilliant programmers, who could have done almost anything with their abilities, followed the siren song of the high paycheck into careers in finance. Some of them are happy there - but it’s in a way really kind of shitty that a lot of the greatest minds of our time are working long hours to enrich private equity firms.

Imagine if Newton or Einstein or Da Vinci dedicated their energies to creating solutions so proprietary that even the problems they solve can’t be specified to anyone not under NDA.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with using abilities to make money - but I think there might be a way to mitigate this financial sector brain drain for the benefit of humanity at large.

Puzzle games are always really hit or miss for me - a good puzzle game has to be simple enough that I can understand its primitives easily, but complex enough that I can come back again and again to plumb new emergent depths.

Hundreds is exactly that game.

Part of me really liked Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, but part of me found it really infurating. There’s a split here - this novel is actually two separate documents glued together with some interesting courtroom drama and political maneuvering. I liked the first document, which is an adventure story. I liked the glue. But I felt that the second drama was a straw man so egregious that it does a lot more harm than good to the cause it’s meant to support.

I just finished Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloane. Overall I really enjoyed it - it was a creative romp through time and space, technology and typography. It had one major flaw, in my opinion - I hated the protagonist. But I’ll get to that.

This is the book for you if your first reaction to stories about wide-ranging adventure-filled quests to unearth ancient secrets is ‘huh, with the right google-fu you could have done most of this in your living room.’

My fiance, Ryan Stolte-Sawa, recorded some covers of some songs with her dad Rick. He plays guitar and does some singing, she does main vocals and some accompaniment on violin and mandolin.

I really like these, and I particularly like the Nick Cave and John Prine songs.

If you’d like to download the set, you’ll find the zip file here.

[I removed the files from this post because Amazon was charging me a lot for the streaming. I will put ‘em back once I’ve figured out how to integrate S3 storage into this business…]

This essay, from novelist and psychedelic philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, remains one of my favorite pieces of writing about what it means to be human. This essay is at once humbling and inspiring, and whether or not you agree with his conclusions you’ll be happy you read it.

I finally figured out why I enjoyed Skyfall more than any of the other Bond movies. Spoilers to follow if you haven’t seen it, but hear me out.

I later learned that there are a few other libs that also try to solve this problem, but I still like mine: it’s lightweight and gets the job done quickly.

So, I’m still very much into robotics and hardware hacking these days, though I’ve not devoted nearly as much time to it as I’d have liked to in the past year. Some new advances in our technology at work, though, are going to make it possible for me to write some very powerful, very low-level integration between hardware microcontrollers and our secret sauce.