Book of the Moment: Harry Potter and the Question of Transience: Pop Fad or Lasting Classic?

Well, it's over. All seven books have now been published as promised. I'll attempt to refrain from any overt spoilers, but covert ones are just about unavoidable. Now comes the debate of the century: was it worth it? After all the hype, the "Pottermania", the big fat royalty checks and merchandising slowly start to dissipate (if not disapparate, so to speak): will Harry Potter leave its marks on modern literature? Will it make much of a dent in History other than as numerical footnotes of extraordinary sales figures? Some are even wondering, will all of these kids that are starting off on Harry Potter move on to other books, or this a fluke? I don't care about that last one, but I think that kids reading thousands of pages of Harry Potter are certainly off to a good start...

My take on the books is going to sound a bit harsh, so let me preface it with this: I thought the books were certainly enjoyable, and interesting to read. I don't regret having read them, and I think that the Deathly Hollows does do a decent job at wrapping things up and answering so many of the remaining questions. It's good mindless fantasy.

That said, I don't think that the Harry Potter books are in any way "great" or "classic" works, and they suffer under any true critical gaze. First of all I'm obviously biased and some of this is just my general disregard to the entire genre of Fantasy. Next, I think the books are too formulaic to alone have much true merit (Don't believe me? Read through some of the way too detailed explorations of Harry Potter at MuggleNet and particularly look for mentions of the numbers 3 and 7 ...

World of Thermonuclear War(craft)

Marked {Unreadable Word} {Ink-blot Obscured Number}, 1977:

I love that suspense of dialing into a new system. The anticipation just rises as you wait out the handshake and give the terminal time to slowly fill with characters, the graceful dance almost hypnotic as you try to decipher its contents a handful of letters at a time. You never know what will be waiting for you on the other side. {Attached print out:

Tachyon Bridge Tunneling Service
---------------------------------------
WARNING: Unauthorized access is punishable as a felony in the United States of America under the
Temporal Rights Act of 2034.

Copyright (C) 2037 Eternium Data Corporation.
"When you absolutely need the information yesterday."(R)

Pressing a key signifies that you have read and understand the EULA, privacy policies, terms of
service, and you otherwise qualify for the service.

}

What a weird warning, huh? I know I was using my parent's machine and phone service and all that, but I wasn't really worried about the consequences. It wasn't like I could start a war or anything just by dialing a random bulletin board. Besides, it just seemed like the sort of weird humor that so many board operators love, so I made a copy on dad's really expensive new dot matrix printer.

Pressing a key caused things to go haywire immediately as large chunks of garbage started scrolling past. It looked like bad connection, but before I decided to reset the moment I hesitated. It was scrolling past faster than my modem's data rate. I was sure of it, and it was getting faster by the second. I started to notice bits and pieces of patterns. Something like "http://" showed up a lot. I wouldn't remember it if it weren't for the next bit of weirdness... The ...

The Andromeda Coda, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Abyss

I've watched some of Andromeda in Sci-Fi reruns and it's a tough show to watch in reruns because ultimately across the 5 seasons of it there is more like 3 different shows with the same casts: the opening season and a half form a somewhat tight arc with clear intentions, the middle section is squishy and just shy of nonsensical, and the Sci-Fi purchased season 5 is nonsensical, bending the middle section back towards the opening themes weakly. The disjoints are clearly due to behind the scenes pressures and show up as clear events: 1) The head writer was thrown away half-way into Season 2 in an attempt to make the show more palatable to syndication. 2) Sci-Fi picked up the show, attempted to fix the show by returning to the arc-heavy roots while being faithful to the middle section shenanigans and without attempting to bring back the old head writer. (All of this reminds me of Sliders.)

Thanks to the Wikipedia I found Robert Hewitt Wolfe's Insider Info page, which contains a one-act, unofficial coda to the series. Wolfe was the aforementioned head writer of the show's opening sequence, and the coda is an enlightening glimpse of where the show was planned to go, rather than what it became. It's a rare and wondrous thing to get such a glimpse into a television series' back story, and it makes Andromeda more watchable even as it begs the question of how in the future we can encourage more shows to go the distance and give us the hard and true character's journey over the simplistic and easy "happy ending".

I've bought all of Babylon 5 because I love such art, and it is always amazing every time I think about how we get ...

Book of the Moment: InterWorld

InterWorld is just awesome. It fits in a very soft spot for me, resonating with quite a few of my favorite works plus a good number of my own works. It's something of the Heinlein Juvenile that Heinlein might have written alongside his "World Without End Quadrology". It's almost, to forgive an awful metaphor, what one might expect from a Harry Potter and the Princes of Amber: The Television Show, albeit without being a mutant hybrid [1]. It's the pilot episodes to the animated series of a young man discovering that he can walk through worlds, eventually signing up for an Army of alternate versions of himself. Small echoes there of The Man Who Folded Himself with some of the pseudo-dualism of The Longest Journey thrown in. The most difficult thing to the novel is that I at least would like to see it picked up for a few more seasons [2]. A simple, fun "juvenile" adventure story with a twist of multiversal meta-physics.

Book of the Moment: Strata

I've basically exhausted the US published works of Terry Pratchett and so I've had a couple of his books imported at great cost of life by a tribe of allied Amazonian aborigines that I've befriended via relatively frequent correspondences upon the vast world network of hydrodynamic tubing from the United Kingdom...

Strata is one of PTerry's earliest forays into some of the areas that became embellished and expanded in his seminal, fantasy, Discworld series. Only Strata's first voyage to the idea of a disc world was one from a science-fiction viewpoint. As a Sci-Fi concept exploration it is easy to invoke the Ringworld series from Niven as a comparison. It's a worthy comparison, but Ringworld is much more serious. To me Strata reads very much like one of Asimov's more experimental, whimsical tales (sort of an End of Eternity meshed against one of his younger reader works or his humor pieces); bad puns, universe full of whimsy and mystery. As a longtime fan of Asimov, it was quite refreshing. (The only obvious real counter-point to the comparison here being Asimov's long hesitancy to use "alien races", which Strata makes some use of...)

Eureka (TV) and Matt Frewer

I love that Matt Frewer is on Eureka, mostly because I think Max Headroom is still one of the greatest television shows ever.

Cryptographic APIs Are All Poorly Designed!

I'll refrain from pointing fingers because it appears I'm dealing with either an unspoken natural law or an amazing coincidence of cosmic proportions, or just designed by the same sorts of people with the same mindsets. What I'm looking to do may not be a common use case, but it sure is a "simple" use case and I can't understand why some of it needs to be as difficult as it is and also why some of it isn't even possible! I'm about ready to start banging my head against the wall because the more I look at the problem the simpler my needs seem and the more complex and unmanageable it appears to be to get from thought in head to implemented code. Grrr...

Microsoft Really Believes in the Xbox, Now At Least

Was watching CNBC today and a headline was talking about the recently announced "billion dollar effort" in the Xbox and questioning "Should Microsoft Dump the Xbox?". I didn't catch the actual story, but I think the obvious answer here is a negative. For those that don't know, the "billion dollar effort" is an amazing announcement by Microsoft, by way of Xbox honcho Peter Moore, that Microsoft was now retroactively extending 360 warranties to 3 years and paying back customers that have had to pay in the past for the fix to the "red ring of death", plus implementing the fixes into new manufacturing processes. This is "bad news" for Microsoft, from the business/shareholder view point, that warranted a full apology and the mention of an estimated price tag of "over 1.5 billion dollars" (estimated by Microsoft). This isn't the result of a class action lawsuit and it appears to be a carefully calculated move here. It's a move that I think is obviously a sign that Microsoft really does believe in the Xbox 360, now at least if not before.

This marks the second occasion that Microsoft has seen fit to retroactively extend warranty service. The first was followed by major announcements and increased sales growth. This one is way too conveniently timed "cleaning the skeletons out of the closet", right before E3 and major announcements of what already looks to be a huge Fall and Spring season for the 360. (Bioshock and Mass Effect both are tantalizing their intended segments already.) Plus this "bad business news" is great news to existing owners and huge news to prospective consumers as the red ring of death was one of the few remaining excuses some people had from buying a 360.

I'm expecting major announcements ...