What better way to spend Sponge Day1 than composing a short, undoubtably incomplete, list of the notable things I’ve read, watched, played, listened to, and otherwise “consumed” in 2014? (Rhetorical question.)

Existential threats to humanity

I read Superintelligence with an odd mixture of dread and amusement; I’m still not sure which response is the appropriate one.2 If nothing else, it’s a fascinating mental exercise to try to imagine workable strategies for constraining an entity much much smarter than yourself: like picking your own intelligence up by its own bootstraps.

Similarly bleak, but much more fun, are the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts. These are very much novels of ideas, and fascinating and provocative ideas at that. Your mileage may vary, however, particularly if you don’t like too much cruelty in your fiction (whether practised by author or characters). (I stopped reading his Rifters series when it passed my cruelty threshold: this series didn’t hit me so hard, but it definitely hit me.) You could use his video on vampires for calibration: I find it hilarious (watch the corporate slogans at lower-right), but also pretty sick. (Expect some realistic gore, pictures of dead people, and lots of talking about unpleasant things.) If you enjoy it, you’ll probably enjoy the books too: it’s backstory for both.

Comforting illusions

One nice thing about Blindsight is that it comes with endnotes. The endnotes lead me to Being No One, a hefty philosophical tome by Thomas Metzinger, who argues that there is no such thing as a “self”. I stalled halfway, because he argues his case with great precision: 713 pages of it, in fact. But I think he’s basically right. (This is quite an unusual response to a philosophical argument; in fact, I think I’ve only had it once before, with Ruth Millikan‘s theory of meaning. This isn’t entirely coincidence: Metzinger cites Millikan approvingly3 and his work shares with hers the broad research program of letting abstract philosophy and the natural sciences support and inform each other, instead of maintaining their recent4 separation.) Deeply thought-provoking, and also very pleasant to be reading philosophy again.

Lovely

The iOS/Android game Monument Valley is very lovely and very clever indeed. It’s also that rare beast, a mobile game with a simple mechanic (perspective tricks, essentially) which is not easily amenable to cloning: I think you have to have a particularly warped kind of imagination to come up with puzzles that use that mechanic effectively.

Luminaris is a beautiful 6-minute film.

Tricky

I backed the Kickstarter project Hadean Lands in 2010. I’m very proud to appear not just on its acknowledgements page but also on the leaderboard, by virtue of finishing it within the first week after its release. If you like interactive fiction this is a must.

Misc. fic.

2014 brought a new Dragaera novel, Hawk. These are something of a guilty pleasure for me, and I plan to write something about why at some point. For the moment, let me say that if you like contemporary commercial fantasy (swords and magic) these are worth a look. If you normally steer clear of commercial fantasy because of its dubious social assumptions, I have a blog post brewing for you.

2014 also brought Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Ancillary Justice. Less effective than the first, as the protagonist’s moral superiority to everyone around her started to grate on me, but still well worth reading.

Right now I’m halfway through Nicola Griffith’s Hild, which I’m finding spectacularly good.

Comics

Bad Machinery is stopping, but the print editions are still coming and I’m sure whatever John Allison does next will be equally worth following.

I’m still reading Gunnerkrigg Court. In fact, at the same time I’m replaying the story (at a slightly faster pace), using a python utility I wrote for that purpose.

Totally hooked on Broodhollow. If you like shivers and laughs, it might get you too.

Balkan ska/punk

Baildsa is a great band full of exuberance and energy. (Disclosure: we know some of them. They’re good people.) With 7/8 rhythms and wailing modal-microtonal solos, this is not your granddad’s two-tone ska, but the Balkan influence works astonishingly well. I have rocked United States of Balkans many many times this year, and just now discovered that you can download their new album, zVaRnA, from their website.

Those that have just broken a flower vase

Notes:

  1. The day after Boxing Day, of course. [↪]
  2. The Fermi paradox gets a lot more bite once we’re talking about beings with the desire and ability to convert the entire universe into computronium. [↪]
  3. He seems to have a rather suspect notion of evolution as optimising, rather than satisficing, however; I don’t recall this being present in Millikan’s work, although it’s possible I missed it. He would benefit from working through Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which at 1433 pages might also inspire him to attempt brevity. [↪]
  4. This is really a product of the last couple of centuries; Europeans in on the birth of what we now call “science” referred to themselves as “natural philosophers”, a term which I would love to see reinstated. Not least because it implies something quite funny about all other philosophers. [↪]