chanson

My latest crack shipment from Amazon has arrived, bearing three new books: House of Leaves and Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, and The Assault on Reason by Al Gore.

It should be obvious why I bought Gore's latest book, but what about the Danielewski books? It's all thanks to Something Awful. Specifically, an archived comedy-gold thread titled "MS Paint children's books that start out normal, but aren't." If you have a couple free hours, there's a lot of entertainment to be had there — just like with all of Something Awful.

There were two specific comics from that thread which stood out to me. The first was the story of Billy and his friend! by Loden Taylor. (You'll want to see this direct Image Socket link since the comic was thumbnailed and you'll need to click it anyway.)

The second was the story of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Fun by Al Cu Ad Solte. It was wonderfully disturbing, and the disturbed reactions were even better. (Direct Image Socket links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.)

I ♥ Something Awful.

A lot of people have started trying to use the recent and tragic rampage at Virginia Tech to further their own political agenda. Gun control, gun ownership, immigration, isolation, mental health advocates, tough-love advocates, everyone is just itching to do whatever they can to use this event to further their own cause.

As for myself, I just read Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. It was just last weekend that I decided to pick it up, and discovered that the Borders next door to the coffee shop I was at actually had a copy in stock even though their computer didn't even think they could order it.

Spoiler warning: Yeah, spoilers follow. If you're interested and don't want any plot details spoiled — and if you are interested, you should really go in as "cold" as you can — stop reading here.

Battle Royale is set in an alternate-history fascist Japan right around our own time that, as part of its enforcement of social order, every year or two runs The Program. In The Program, a third-year junior high class is — without their knowledge or consent — taken to a battleground, armed, and forced to fight each other to the death. That's 9th grade to Americans, 14-to-15-year-olds. They're forced to fight by means of electronic remote monitoring & explosive collars around their necks; if nobody dies over a 24-hour period, everyone dies. If there's more than one person left alive at the end of The Program, everyone dies.

It is, in short, some fucked up shit.

I won't spoil the ending, but I will point out that it was extremely controversial in Japan as a novel, and then as a film, and there are persistent stories that an American remake — rather than an American release — of the film are in the works.

So, how does this tie in to the Virginia Tech tragedy? I'm a pro-gun liberal; I think people have the right to a wide variety of weapons, and the right to carry them, and that those rights should be protected. However, I also happen to think that weapons do need some amount of control. Having lots of students carrying or having access to weapons at Virginia Tech wouldn't have helped any more than having very few armed; the situation was too extreme for people to deal with rationally. And the Battle Royale film's infamous lighthouse scene provides a very good illustration of this.

The problem is that while an armed society is a polite society, that's only true so long as everyone is polite. As soon as someone starts being rude it can quickly become a paranoid society. Is it better for everyone to be helpless in the face of extreme violence? No, but it's not entirely bad, either, that not everybody is ready to play Rambo at a moment's notice.

I just hope that this event doesn't remove what little rationality is left from the discussion of such issues. In either direction.

Would anybody be interested in starting a geek book club, where we'd get together once every week or two to talk about some new book?

I have a lot of books I want to read — most of which are sitting on a glass-topped coffee table, in piles which really can't grow any taller without risking table integrity — and I'd probably invest more time in reading them if I were to actually plan on talking about them, or about parts of them, with other people.

If that's something other folks in the Bay Area would be into, let me know in comments or in email and I'll see if I can figure something out!

Demonstrate your adoration well, my subjects!

(Really, you don't have to get me anything. I know you all adore me already, and can't wait for me to take my rightful place as your Great Leader. This is more so I have links to my wish list somewhere "permanent" so I can pass them along to those who really do want it. Honest!)

Am I the only one who's noticed how similar the speaking styles of Bruce Sterling (blog) and Jello Biafra are?

This is very Snow Crash.

In reading a Reuters article on Yahoo! News about a possible North Korean ICBM test launch I saw that there was a marked-up satellite photo available, labeled "Reuters photo." Clicking on it and reading its caption, it turned out not to be a photo from Reuters themselves, but from GlobalSecurity.org. There's a bit of annotated satellite imagery available on the site.

Who or what is GlobalSecurity.org? According to their web site:

GlobalSecurity.org’s unique positioning enables it to reach both a targeted and large diversified audience. The content of the website is updated hourly, as events around the world develop, providing in-depth coverage of complicated issues. The breadth and depth of information on the site ensures a loyal repeat audience. This is supplemented by GlobalSecurity.org’s unique visibility in the mass media, which drives additional growth.

In other words, it's web-based authoritative open source intelligence analysis. Next thing you know, it'll be participatory too, like Wikipedia.

Programming:WebObjects is an open-content book on WebObjects that's taking shape on Wikibooks.

Pierce T. Wetter III's great mailing list post this past May comparing WebObjects versus Ruby on Rails for Ajax is there as part of a section on comparisons with alternative technologies.

Furthermore, information on the Ajax framework in Project WONDER — the Open Source collection of enhanced frameworks for WebObjects — is also part of the book now. (An overview of Project WONDER is available as part of Wolf Rentzsch's CAWUG presentation. Of course, there's an overview of Ajax in WebObjects too, which will come in handy when additional resources are added.

If you're doing WebObjects development and you're interested in adding Ajax support to your application, check it out! And if you have any tips and tricks for working with WebObjects, why not contribute them?

From part 1:

I'm trying to work my way through my huge to-read pile. Well, piles. I have an end table dedicated to it, and boy howdy are there a lot of books on it. I need to not get any more books until I've worked through at least about a third of the pile.

I'm now maintaining my reading list on my personal web site, Eschatologist.net. So much to read...

I'm trying to work my way through my huge to-read pile. Well, piles. I have an end table dedicated to it, and boy howdy are there a lot of books on it. I need to not get any more books until I've worked through at least about a third of the pile. Here's a rundown of what's in it, in no particular order:

• The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
• Learn to Program, Chris Pine
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
• Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
• Collapse, Jared Diamond
• Step Into Xcode, Fritz Anderson
• Beginning Xcode, James Bucanek
• The Elements of C++ Style, Trevor Misfeldt, Gregory Bumgardner, Andrew Gray
• Programming Ruby, Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, & Andy Hunt
• Agile Web Development with Rails, Dave Thomas & David Heinemeier Hansson
• Practical Common Lisp, Peter Seibel
• Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, Paul Dourish
• On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins & Sandra Blakeslee
• Refactoring to Patterns, Joshua Kerievsky
• User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn
• Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman
• Amplifying Your Effectiveness, Gerald Weinberg
• The End of Faith, Sam Harris
• Revolution in the Valley, Andy Hertzfeld
• Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford & Matt Webb
• The Art of Project Management, Scott Berkun
• Applied Software Project Management, Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene
• Best Software Writing I, Joel Spolsky
• A Theory of Fun, Raph Koster
• The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil
• Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson

No more books until I'm through at least five of those.

Update, 7 May 2006: Aw, whatever. I'm still restraining myself, but if I see something good...