(b)logophile

#JustPlay

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0300

Early this year Samuel Goodwin (who I first met when he gave us some help with our iOS app, back in the long-ago days when I was getting started with Objective C) posted a challenge: to record and publish a minute of musical performance, once a day for thirty days. A month ago we started, and Samuel has been posting daily roundups: today is the last day of that challenge, and I have an unbroken thirty-day streak. (In fact I have 32 videos including one blooper, which puzzles me. I guess I lost count somewhere and doubled up.)

I’ve got recordings of mandolin, mandocello, one of lavta, all three bouzouki-family instruments (tiny baglama, middle-sized tzouras, and the bouzouki itself), and one last-minute late-night recording in which I “sing” a west-African drum rhythm. My favourite is yesterday’s blooper, in which I realised I’d forgotten the first word to a Greek song only after starting to sing the word in question.

Some other folk have used the challenge to work up a single piece (e.g. Samuel has been working on Hysteria on bass and Ben Scheirman is learning a Stevie Ray Vaughn solo). In typically disorganised fashion, on the second-to-last day of the challenge I found a piece I want to give that kind of attention to (a Greek rebetika number); the rest of the month has mostly been material I’m already pretty comfortable with.

That’s not to say it hasn’t been challenging! The first thing this process has helped me with is overcoming my perfectionism: when I’m taking ten minutes out of my lunch break on a work day, I simply can’t afford to keep making new takes until I’m satisfied. (The one-minute limitation imposed by Instagram is quite helpful in this respect also.) The second big hurdle for me was starting from instrumental music (which I’ve been performing in public since I guess my early teens) and adding my voice: in the end (besides the dundun rhythm) I pulled together the courage to sing on a few tracks, from bluegrass and gospel to rebetika. Having other people working on the same challenge was key for me in overcoming this particular insecurity, so thanks all y’all other folk for stepping up!

Besides the “do you dare to put your voice on the internet?” and the “can you arrange recording time every day for a month?” aspects, I feel distinct technical improvement over the course of the month (especially on the bouzouki-family instruments over the last couple of weeks). I guess the half-hour per day that I ended up putting in is really significantly more string time than I’ve been taking until now. Without the daily recording of course this will ease back somewhat, but I intend to try to keep some of the momentum, with a regular string session after I finish work on weekdays (and maybe the occasional video, who knows?).

Having seen the power of doing something (even if something small) every day for a month, I intend to try to apply the same technique in a completely different arena. I’d love to be able to draw accurately the beautiful natural shapes I see around me (tree forms, leaves, insects, and so on) so I’m going to be posting a daily #JustDraw sketch (on instagram) for the next month to see what that does for me. For me #JustPlay was about taking technical skills I already have, and overcoming insecurities in showing them to the world. #JustDraw is the exact opposite: because I’m starting from no technical skill whatsoever I have no fear of failure, and I hope the daily repitition will help me achieve visible technical progress.

Thanks Samuel for kicking this whole thing off, and to all the other folk who participated (both the dedicated streak-fillers and the occasional drop-ins). It’s been great!

2017: Year in Review

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0200

This is the fifth in a series of yearly summaries (along with my reading list, almost the only thing that makes it to this blog these days). Previous installments: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. This year I used a quantified-self tool to get a stochastic picture of my daily activities, but as an exercise in humility I’m going to write this entry without looking at its data, then write a follow-up after I’ve had a look at what I was really busy with this year. So in terms of unreliable, sucked-from-the-thumb impressions…

2017 brought more stability, as we settled in to Melissochori: Manu started preschool, we “resolved” the internet situation (by getting on the neighbour’s wifi), the folk at the post office and the grocery store know us. We even made hazelnut butter, with hazelnuts from a friend’s tree. Olga has joined the parents’ association for Manu’s preschool, which is getting us even more involved in village life. Anatolia declined to renew her contract (which otherwise would legally have had to give her a permanent position), which removed a great deal of stress and late night lesson preparation.

Highlights for the family were visits from Nannina from New Zealand in May, and our summer holiday (visiting friends on Evvia and free-camping on Skyros). At the end of the summer I happened on a djembe and dundun lesson, playing exactly the same West African repertoire that I remember from my Dunedin days (and, like our Dunedin group, playing for dance lessons and performances as well): I’ll continue those lessons roughly monthly in 2018, and it’s bringing me great joy.

Another highlight is Manu’s growing musical abilities. We bought a keyboard halfway through the year, and (wary of putting him off by pushing him at it too hard) left him to experiment with it by himself. He’s learned several songs by ear, and is discovering things like parallel octaves, (very) simple left-hand accompaniments, and even the major and minor triads. He goes to music lessons in the weekends now, playing glockenspiel, and is still enthusiastic about his piano time, singing, and drumming. Most likely we’ll get him a drumkit this year: when a 4-year-old spends more than six months consistently wanting the same thing, it seems like an indication that the enthusiasm is worth encouraging.

Yannos is shaping up to be a handful. He’s very energetic and active, and really needs a larger yard than we have to burn off energy in. He’s also, though, much sweeter than Manu at the same age: more aware of others’ emotions, and also more cuddly. He shows no musical aptitude whatsoever, but is nonetheless an enthusiastic singer.

Media consumption

As I do every year, I read a lot of books. This year I picked up lots via Kindle sales and Humble bundles; on balance I think this was not a success, as I’m too much of a snob to consistently enjoy the random-ish selections. I averaged about one book a week, with peak reading rates much higher than that. This is definitely too much, and I should try to scale back my reading to make more space for household and family contributions.

This year my Twitter addiction got noticeably worse, especially fueled by Trump and Brexit anxiety. This side of Twitter, of course, hardly makes me happier, but this year I also discovered a number of graphic artists and folk posting photos of insects, which counterbalances Twitter’s emotional contribution somewhat. Like my reading, though, it’s clear that this takes too much of my time. (The association is no coincidence: I read a lot using the iOS Kindle app, and besides my Twitter addiction I have a clear glowing-touchscreen addiction I need to do something about.) This is one area where I expect to be horrified by the quantified-self results, which will give me an estimate of just how many hours a day I spend, on average, this way.

As in 2016 I didn’t discover much new music. Various people we know or follow put out new albums, but apart from those I spent most of the year with the same old lot on repeat. New CDs I’ve enjoyed this year:

Ο Βασιλιάς των Πουλιών, (O Vasilias ton Poulion, The King of the Birds) a collection of stories (in Greek) told by Anthi Thanou (Ανθή Θάνου) with music by Alexandros Makris (Αλέξανδρος Μακρής). Both Anthi and Alexis are good friends of ours, and the album even features a song Olga wrote, but despite this connection I think I can semi-objectively say that this is a lovely CD for early-school children (Greek-speaking, of course).
Eight Winds, Sokratis Sinopoulos Quartet. We saw them perform pieces from this album early in the year. At its best it’s beautiful; its less-than-best wobbles towards triteness.
Esperanto, Dimitris Mistakidis. Each piece is recorded with different musicians and singers; the ones I like I like very much, while some others I dislike enough to skip when they play.
Frog Trouble and Dog Train by Sandra Boynton. I think these are great fun, but somehow Manu and Yannos weren’t grabbed by them. They might just be a bit too young: we’ll try them again in a year or two.
Modal4, self-titled. Again this is a bunch of people we know, variously as music teachers and as friends, but I think I can see past that to recommend it to folks who listen to both jazz and modal music (Turkish, Arabic, Indian, etc).
Tatavla by Trio Tatavla. Some years ago Olga followed an accordion seminar given by Dimos Vougioukas, and later that year we travelled to Brussels (to hear some other friends play rebetika) and visited him at his apartment. That day he was hosting Tcha Limburger and Benjamin Clement, and they played a number of songs while we sat spellbound. I thought they were preparing for a concert, and was utterly amazed to hear that this was the first time they had played together. This album (which Olga put under our Christmas tree) grew out of that session, and is a truly wonderful gift to finish the year with.

I played a bunch of computer games this year. I’m still working my way through XCOM 2 (mostly on my Amsterdam visits), and I guess at some point I’ll probably get War of the Chosen and replay it. Late in the year I picked up 80 Days, which was enjoyable enough but I’ve managed to avoid getting hooked on it (I can see how one could replay an incredible number of times, trying to get more juice out of the storylines that didn’t complete, or didn’t complete satisfactorily, in any given play-through). Also a late arrival was Gorogoa which I loved unreservedly.

Media production and creativity

I finished the year on a bit of a downer, but looking back over my twitter feed for the year (yes really) I did manage to create one or two things.

Early in the year I discovered Tracery and Cheap Bots Done Quick, and with their help produced two Twitter bots: Tiny marginalia (a completely trivial, and very small, Tracery grammar), and Tiny knotwork (a relatively trivial Tracery grammar until you reach the terminals, which are an awful mishmash of SVG). Googling Celtic knotwork pattern algorithms lead me to Chaz Boston Baden’s page, where he does it much better, and I started playing with those, with encouraging results. (This happened to land during Train Jam, and I suspect a whole carriage of generative-systems geeks might have passed it around, judging by the surprising number of likes that tweet got.) This got as far as an app I run on my iPhone, but not as far as something I would put into the world. (Like many of my iOS side projects, it’s stuck on my lack of UX chops.)

I fixed the handle on our coffeepot (again, this time somewhat more permanently) which reminded me how much I love working with wood. Also I finished my first wooden head (carved from a piece of firewood, started summer 2016) and started my second (started summer 2017, still not even close to finished). They’re both terribly ugly, but mostly very fun to work on, and they’ve made me pay attention to facial anatomy in a way I never had before.

Inspired by @wolfCatWorkshop’s automata I spent an evening making a runner and a unicyclist. By far the best thing about this exercise was seeing someone else pick up the idea.

On the musical side I’ve gotten significantly better on mandolin, which I find somewhat surprising since I have the feeling my practise sessions were few and far between. (Perhaps the quantified self data will surprise me, I don’t know.) I learned one movement of a Bach cello suite on my (almost-)mandocello, but most of my effort went into the standard mandolin. (Incidentally I’m now more-or-less definite that the next instrument I acquire ought to be a mandola. Which means it will be a long time coming, as they are far from cheap.) As well as the Bach (which plays equally sweetly on the mandolin) I’ve learned songs by John Reischman (from a set of excellent transcriptions), David Benedict, and Janos Koolen & Lucas Beukers (the Koolen half of whom gave me some mandolin lessons when I lived in Amsterdam), and various Greek stuff (including, with great enjoyment, a piece from Tatavla just this last week). I’m (ever so slowly) building a repertoire that I can play well, nestled in the circle of pieces I can manage, themselves a subset of the pieces I can fumble through if someone else gives me reminders at crucial moments (where most of my rebetika repertoire lives these days).

And finally, I wrote something for this blog, the first time for about two years that I’ve put something here that wasn’t pure navel-gazing. While extremely satisfying, that little project brings into sharp focus the essential uselessness of this blog. It will stick around for a while yet (if nothing else I find these yearly exercises useful for me) but long-term it should really either metamorphose into something useful or complete the transition into quietude.

What I worried about

Greek taxes. Always.
The rise of fascism in the Western world (still) and the shadowy forces promoting and enabling it.
The household division of labour, which is far and away tilted in my favour.
My slowly sagging physical and mental health.

What’s coming up?

As the boys get older we’re slowly clawing back some time for ourselves. Hopefully this will be the year we get to play some music together again. I get so much joy from woodworking, I’d like to do more of that (including, at least, finishing last year’s carving). And I’ve got a long-running interest in generative art, which never quite gets off the ground because with each new idea I’m starting from zero in terms of tooling. Comparing that speedbump to the ease with which I can throw together an iOS app (for ideas which live naturally in my pocket), it’s probably worth my investing some time in getting comfortable with some particular toolset, so I can start straight in with an idea, instead of worrying about how to get points and lines displaying and animating.

That’s all somewhat self-indulgent. Two more significant projects for the new year are to start exercising regularly, and to start contributing properly to the running of our household. These are both in the “I know I oughta… maybe tomorrow” bucket, but if there’s anything the promotion of an arbitrary point in our planetary orbit is good for it’s allowing the illusion of instantaneous change: 2018 will be better, because I will make it so.

2017 reading record

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This is the third year running I’ve kept track of my reading. Earlier editions: 2016, 2015. Like last year, I used a little custom-built iOS app which is very low-friction, so I probably caught just about everything. If you can think of anything to do with this data, it’s on github. This year the data is less rich than last year, though, because LibraryThing’s REST API no longer returns responses when queried by title. That’s also why the entries below are not linked: I don’t have any automated way to get those URLs any more, and I’m far too lazy to do them all by hand. I added little manicles to any I think deserve special attention.

☛ Starting the year I re-read Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy. This is classic SF-as-literature-of-ideas, with the ideas in the transhumanist singularitarian corner of the genre, wrapped up in a technicolour space opera. Good rollicking fun; I also like it because he leaves a lot of the setting unexplained at first, so you get the pleasure of puzzling it out as you go.
- The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi. (29/12-03/01)
- The Fractal Prince, Hannu Rajaniemi. (03/01-07/01)
- The Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi. (12/01-17/01)
Invisible Planets: Collected Fiction, Hannu Rajaniemi. These show a lot of the same themes as the Quantum Thief trilogy, but they didn’t work as well for me; I think I missed the multiple clever ideas mixing and interfering, which the short format makes much less common. (08/01-11/01)
Snake Agent, Liz Williams. I think I read this one deliberately looking to take up a new series. It didn’t grab me. (17/01-22/01)
The Fortress at the End of Time, Joe M McDermott. Best McDermott I’ve read so far (or I should say, the McD which best connected with my taste: he’s one of those authors I suspect I underrate because he happens not to push my particular buttons). (23/01-24/01)
Slow River, Nicola Griffith. Since reading Hild I’ve become a committed Griffith fan, and started reading her back catalogue. This one is very ambitious, but I think she was overreaching herself at this point in her career. I do enjoy the way she defaults to using women for all the minor characters: it’s interesting to notice how unusual that is. (29/01-29/01)
Roger Zelazny. I read several recommendations in row, so I found something I could pick up cheap. These two, at least, seem quite dated to me.
- Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny. (29/01-30/01)
- Eye of Cat, Roger Zelazny. (30/01-31/01)
The Stars are Legion, Kameron Hurley. Pulpy. Quite high squick factor, lots of body fluids. (07/02-10/02)
Yoon Ha Lee.
- ☛ Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee. Brain-wrenching space opera. Fabulous setting, dubious plot. (12/02-14/02)
- Raven Strategem, Yoon Ha Lee. Decent sequel to Ninefox Gambit, but it suffers from the classic sequel effect: most of what makes Ninefox so fabulous is that it introduces us to this utterly bizarre setting, but that’s a trick you can only pull once. (14/06-17/06)
- Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee. Collected short fiction. Lots of these use essentially the same trick as Ninefox did, even when they don’t share the setting. Of course it loses quite some of its effect through repetition. (22/03-31/03)
☛ The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin. Fabulous setting, deep and important themes, slightly let down by the nitty-gritty of telling a story about people, but richly deserving of at least one of its two Hugo wins. Excellent review at Asking the Wrong Questions.
- The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. (14/02-17/02)
- The Obelisk Gate, NK Jemisin. (17/02-25/02)
- The Stone Sky, NK Jemisin. (19/08-24/08)
☛ The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman. Wonderful for its systematic puncturing of so many fantasy tropes, its Weird West setting, and its style. (26/02-11/03)
Transition, Iain Banks. Turns out I had already read this once, but it took me at least halfway through to realise. (12/03-20/03)
☛ The Solitudes, John Crowley. Magnificent, but between the rich style and the fact that I have it on paper and thus can’t read it while putting the kids to sleep, it took me an incredibly long time to finish it. (I’m still working on the sequel.) (31/03-18/11)
☛ The Summer Book, Tove Jansson. Beautiful, gentle, strange. Everything that is wonderful about the Moomins, for grownups. (05/04-17/04)
Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey. Kindle editions regularly run discounted to just a couple of euros. This one is a reminder that I should still apply some filtering. It’s not even particularly bad, life’s just too short, y’know? (06/04-15/04)
Speculative Fiction 2012, eds Justin Landon & Jared Shurin. I think I did end up reading several novels on the strength of reviews in here, so that counts as a win. (23/04-24/04)
Speculative Fiction 2013, eds Ana Grilo & Thea James. Ditto. (24/04-01/05)
Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman. This pretty clearly marks my parting of ways with Gaiman. I will try to get Sandman before Manu hits high school though. (02/05-04/05)
Tender: Stories, Sofia Samatar. These are good, but I enjoyed her longer work more. (05/05-16/05)
Surface Detail, Iain M Banks. Standard Banks Culture SF. (17/05-28/05)
☛ Mechanique, Genevieve Valentine. Rich and sad; takes one idea and pushes it to its bitter end. (28/05-06/06)
☛ At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson. Some hits and some misses in this collection. One definite hit is The Man Who Bridged the Mist, which reoccurs below. There are enough hits to make it worth checking out. (10/06-12/06)
First Person Peculiar, Mike Resnick. I remember very little of this one. (12/06-17/06)
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and other stories, John Kessel. Also of this. (19/06-24/06)
Babel-17, Samuel R Delaney. Terribly misguided, but also terribly fun. I wish he was still writing SF. (25/06-06/07)
The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross. Latest in the Laundry series. Better than the previous, but still not up to the earlier series standard (which I think peaked with Fuller and Apocalypse). The Forecasting Operations Department make another appearance, and again are used as a get-out-of-authorial-jail-free card: this time they train a gigantic spotlight on a plot point that otherwise would be invisible (because it’s utterly arbitrary) but which the reader has to notice in order to set up tension for the next in the series. I will keep reading these “to find out what happens” but my expectations get lower with each installment. (11/07-14/07)
The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells. Very average fantasy. Slight aura of game tie-in, with the antagonist race’s tech-tree-like special abilities: I don’t think it is a game tie-in, but that’s the sort of tropes it’s working with. (17/07-29/07)
The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson. The bits directly about slavery are (of course) incredibly painful to read; the magical stuff knitting it together is rather thin. (30/07-03/08)
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford. One of those books you might drop tidbits from if you want to sound smart. (03/08-19/08)
River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey. The hippos are good honest silly fun; the progressive agenda is rather a lot too explicit even for me. (29/08-30/08)
Kabu Kabu, Nnedi Okorafor. These are clearly drawing on a cultural background I’m unfamiliar with, which makes them sometimes intriguing and sometimes just difficult. I enjoyed most the windseeker stories that roughly hang together in a single continuity. (30/08-06/09)
Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. These are ridiculously readable and have a decently clever setting, but it’s a fair bit more chaotic than I like, with tropes like vampires, gargoyles, scorpion-people, etc that feel out of joint with the much more thoughtful worldbuilding around the Craft itself and its history and politics. Closest comparison from my regular reading would be Steven Brust’s Dragaera series: Craft suffers in contrast because while it clearly wants to be about something significant, in the end it doesn’t quite manage to make it stick.
- Last First Snow, Max Gladstone. (07/09-11/09)
- Two Serpents Rise, Max Gladstone. (12/09-17/09)
- Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. (17/09-18/09)
- Four Roads Cross, Max Gladstone. (18/09-23/09)
- Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone. (24/09-24/09)
- The Ruin of Angels, Max Gladstone. (24/09-02/10)
Provenance, Ann Leckie. A solid “something different” after her Ancillary trilogy. It’s nice to get away from Breq’s moral and tactical superiority, but Ingray is a bit absurdly hopeless, especially in (unfair) contrast to Breq. As with the Ancillary trilogy, my flat-out favourite moments came from her playing with the hermeneutic circle: the Presger Translators in the Ancillary trilogy, and the Geck Ambassador in Provenance (“Diplomat does not mean nice. Diplomat means tell the aliens to leave us alone.”). (03/10-08/10)
Vallista, Steven Brust. A new Dragaera novel is always a cause for celebration! I wasn’t so taken with the “local plot” of this one, but it drops several rather broad hints about where Brust is going with the entire ridiculous 20-book master plan. (17/10-19/10)
☛ Winter Tide, Ruthanna Emrys. I found this one so fascinating I wrote about it. It’s a bit difficult to give a review-style “score”, because I don’t think it’s an especially good novel (it’s not bad, it’s just not great, as far as I can judge), but the subcreation jiu-jitsu is genuinely inspired. (21/10-24/10)
The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard. Overwrought. (05/11-12/11)
Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, Ed. Catherine Asaro. Standout from this collection is The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson. (13/11-22/11)
Central Station, Lavie Tidhar. Interesting for its placement just far enough from SF’s white-Western-technical-bloke history but still close enough to belong clearly to that tradition. It didn’t hit the balance I would have preferred between epistemic and ontological uncertainty, both for the reader and for the implied author. There’s a good chance that’s more to do with my preferences than with any defects in the novel itself though. (26/11-03/12)
Riddle-Master, Patricia A. McKillip. This trilogy started very strong, and has lots to recommend it right to the end, but it gets extremely emo around halfway through then holds that note right to the end: I would have much preferred that the angst be leavened with the same gentle humour at play in the first of the trilogy. (03/12-09/12)
Slow Bullets, Alastair Reynolds. Confirms a previous suspicion, that Alastair Reynolds is very definitely not for me. (09/12-10/12)
Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts. This collection ends with an essay in which Watts claims, hilariously, to be an optimist. Less intellectually challenging than the work of his I most admire (Blindsight and Echopraxia). (12/12-14/12)
In Calabria, Peter S Beagle. Sweet, but I must admit I feel somewhat uncomfortable reading a May-and-December romance written by a December. (16/12-16/12)
The very best of Kate Elliott, Kate Elliott. I have very mixed feelings about these stories. On the one hand, they show a depth of cultural awareness that makes me suspect Elliott is trained as an anthropologist or something similar, and this richness of cultural background is something I wish for in lots of my other reading. On the other hand, in these stories it’s so prominent that it sometimes seems like that’s her starting point, or her only point, and the stories themselves (taken as stories) are frequently somewhat trope-heavy and weak. I wonder if I’d enjoy her longer work more, with more space to work out “literary” as opposed to “anthropological” themes. (16/12-20/12)

Looking back over these, my main conclusion is that I’m a massive snob. I want writing that is culturally sensitive and embodies progressive values, with plenty of novelty, it should be a page-turner, and please also written with a poet’s sensitivity for the English language. Not much to ask for, surely?

In all seriousness: this list of unreasonable demands means that I probably should give up on random dips into the Amazon bargain bin, and start building a reading backlog of work that has accumulated a solid critical opinion that it’s worth paying attention to. It also makes me value more the books I do deeply appreciate; perhaps 2018 will be my year of rereading.

Winter Tide (subverting a Mythos)

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Ruthanna Emrys’s novel Winter Tide builds on and challenges Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” in ways I find very exciting. This is not a review of Winter Tide (I’m not sure if I liked it as a novel, and I doubt my opinion should be relevant to anyone else), but I want to write about what it does with its Mythos source material and why I’m excited by it. In doing so I’ll describe some details of the plot and absolutely all of the setting: if you care about spoilers you may want to stop reading at this point.

H.P. Lovecraft has a complicated relationship with modern weird fiction. On the one hand of course his stories are massively influential. On the other hand the man himself was poisonously racist, and there are plenty of elements of his work that reflect those attitudes.

If he were less influential it would be easy enough to simply close the lid on his legacy (“he wrote some stuff, you should bear in mind he was pretty racist if you’re going to read it”), but the Cthulhu Mythos has become a massive shared fictional setting, and shared fictional worlds are a serious business both commercially and creatively. So if you’re a writer who wants to work within that shared setting, but you’re deeply uncomfortable with the attitudes that gave it its first form, what to do?

Emrys, brilliantly, largely accepts the events recorded in the Mythos stories as canonical, but completely undercuts their interpretation. (Here is the moment to note that I’m neither a Lovecraft scholar nor a committed fan: I don’t actually know exactly how much massaging of the canonical material is hidden in that “largely”. It’s obvious, though, that the effect she’s aiming for is “different perspective from within the same shared setting” not “rewrite the setting changing the facts”.) Her narrator Aphra is a native of Innsmouth, and from her perspective we see the “Aeonians” as a persecuted religious minority much like any other (apart from the minor issue that Aphra’s folk metamorphose into biologically immortal amphibians after living out a human lifespan). This perspective recasts the various narrators of the Mythos tales as deeply unreliable, blinded by their own prejudice (for instance the stories of human sacrifice in The Shadow Over Innsmouth are simply another blood libel, credulously repeated by the narrator).

The story Emrys wants to tell is about prejudice, particularly racism and sexism. By recasting the Mythos narrators as unreliable in this way, she makes the entire Mythos canon about the same themes: instead of a Mythos story being only incidentally or accidentally racist, the gap between the events it narrates and Aphra’s version of the same events makes the original story, retroactively, draw attention to the narrator’s prejudices. I like to think of this as subcreation jiu-jitsu: taking the energy of the original setting, and redirecting it in the direction of the themes she cares about.

(I’m reminded of Pierre Menard’s Quixote, but the effect is in reverse, with the later work conferring new meaning on the earlier. Borges again: “The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.” Tracking down that quote, which I remembered only very vaguely and wasn’t sure was his at all, makes me think I should spend some time with him again.)

Despite the brilliance of the jiu-jitsu, there’s one aspect of this approach that makes me uncomfortable: it may strip away Lovecraft’s horror of half-breeds, but by accepting the canonical truth of the Deep Ones it carries over an essentialist notion of race unchanged from the original Mythos. Aphra considers her folk to be human, and disagreeing about this is narrated as prejudice in Winter Tide, but they do have some fairly significant biological differences from the rest of humanity (namely, a capacity for metamorphosis into an aquatic form which will live, barring misadventure, until the sun goes out). Even more distressingly, there’s a third subspecies of humanity known as “The Mad Ones Under the Earth”, and it’s implied that the madness in question is a universal racial characteristic with a heritable component. Here Emrys runs the risk of simply shifting the goalposts sideways: showing the Deep One perspective and thereby subverting the Innsmouth narrative of the standard Mythos, but inventing and demonising a new race to fulfill the same narrative role (the uncanny-valley almost-human-but-not-quite Other, the stand-in for Lovecraft’s fear of black people, Jews, and probably plenty of other racial groups as well). I hope that her future work in the same setting will subject the “Mad Ones” notion to the same kind of scrutiny and revision that Winter Tide does for Lovecraft’s Deep Ones.

That one concern aside, though, I love the possibilities that the jiu-jitsu opens up for reinventing the Mythos without revising its fictional-historical canon. For example, one small detail I particularly enjoyed is how Winter Tide (and its short prequel The Litany of Earth) inverts the atmosphere of cosmic horror. Lovecraft’s protagonists are frequently driven insane simply by a clear vision of humanity’s place within an utterly uncaring cosmos. Aphra, who has survived the genocide of her people and is therefore especially aware of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, takes comfort in exactly the same vision:

The words come easily, the familiar verses echoing back through my own short life. In times of hardship or joy, when a child sickened or a fisherman drowned too young for metamorphosis, at the new year and every solstice, the Litany [of intelligent races that have populated and will populate the Earth] gave us comfort and humility. The people of the air, our priest said, phrased its message more briefly: This too shall pass. –The Litany of Earth

It’s fascinating to me to see that Lovecraft’s vision of an uncaring cosmos can survive, as compelling as it ever was, even while the emotional valence attached to that vision flips 180 degress, and to see his subcreation, founded as it is on deeply racist fears, repurposed to tell stories about that very same racism which trigger a fundamental reinterpretation of the original source material.

2016: Year in Review

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0200

This is the fourth in a series of yearly summaries (along with my reading list, almost the only thing that makes it to this blog these days). Previous installments: 2015, 2014, 2013.

After the optimism of last year’s summary, the dominant theme of this year was disillusionment and stress.

Start with the good

There were two resoundingly positive events in 2016: a blissful week on a beach on the Peloponnesus, and moving house to Melissochori.

The beach holiday hung off the side of a festival organised by friends of ours in Patras. They had already spent a couple of weeks free-camping on a beach, and after the festival we joined them for a few short days. We had the beach almost entirely to ourselves, and spent a good deal of the time naked. The boys had a wonderful time (Yannos ate a lot of sand), and I had the spectacular experience of seeing a sea turtle laying her eggs in the sand. (From the second day we saw turtle tracks every morning, and on the last night before we left we took turns walking the beach looking for movement: at three in the morning we took our patrol a bit further along the beach and got lucky.)

In August we packed up in Sykies and moved to Melissochori, slightly North of Thessaloniki. So far the move has been extremely good for us: we see trees instead of cement out our windows, we have a tiny back yard with grass for the boys to play in, and (most importantly) we’re just down the road from some dear friends who we hardly saw when we lived in Sykies. Even better, when Manu starts preschool next September he’ll be taught by those same friends: no matter what else happens, we’ll do our best to stay here until Manu and Yannos move on from their classroom.

On the positive theme, the boys are growing and becoming more capable. Just yesterday we discovered that Manu (3.5) is a natural talent at bumper cars; Yannos has started talking; and every now and then they play together happily without needing our intervention to keep the peace, which is a delight to see.

The less good: the saga of the internet

There is one teeny tiny difficulty with the house we’re renting in Melissochori: it has no internet, and no immediate chance of getting it. This came as something of a surprise to us, since we had done our due diligence before moving in: the owner’s internet speed was not great but would allow me to work, and we had made an application with the phone company to move our account to the new address. There were various complications: the package we had in Sykies was unavailable in Melissochori (VDSL hasn’t arrived there yet), then there was a gap of a few weeks because the company’s record-keeping system was not updated when the administrative regions of Thessaloniki were adjusted recently, which meant our application spent some time being ignored in a completely different village before somebody noticed the mistake. But eventually we got the message: your application has been received, now you just need to wait and at some point a technician will call you to make an appointment for the installation. So we waited… and waited… and waited. (In the meantime I worked from the living-room of those convenient friends just around the corner.) After some weeks of waiting (with the occasional gentle enquiry, met with a shrug and an admonition to patience), we happened to mention the situation to a neighbour, who looked at us in shock: why on earth hadn’t we kept the owner’s phone line? Didn’t we realise that there were no lines available at all in this area?

Further inquiries with OTE, somewhat less gentle, turned up the true situation: because of a lack of network capacity, for the particular street we are renting on there are no new phone lines to be had. (In the meantime the owner’s previous line had been returned and reassigned, of course.) One of our two adjacent neighbours has been waiting more than a year for a phone line.

So for now, I’m working using internet shared from the neighbour who does have internet, and occasionally from our friends’ living-room when I need a more reliable download speed. This is somewhat workable but intensely frustrating, so it looks like we’ll probably end up paying extra for a satellite dish. Besides the annoyance, I’m still absolutely flabbergasted that with all our earlier inquiries, nobody at OTE was willing to tell us the situation until we pressed for it: they would have perfectly happily left us waiting for the technician forever. (I somehow hope this means someone at OTE is ashamed of the situation, but realistically I doubt it.)

More less good: taxes

Another unexpected blow landed just as our idyllic beach holiday was ended: under the new tax laws we’re shifting to paying our income tax in advance, meaning that just this once we paid a double dose: all of 2016’s tax plus a 75% advance on 2017’s. In theory we’re not paying more tax: when we exit the year-in-advance system (either because the law changes or because we reach pension age) we’ll get a rebate and everything will balance out. And if you believe that I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in buying. In the meantime our savings dropped by 20% or so, and are actually lower than they were three years ago (“saving: you’re doing it wrong”).

Even more less good: health scares and babysitting

Just to keep us on our toes, this year Olga’s mum had a health scare (which came to nothing immediately life-threatening, to everyone’s great relief) which has left her unable to help much with the boys (especially now we’ve moved: Melissochori is much less accessible from Katerini than Sykies was). We have to be very careful that Manu doesn’t bring her any respiratory illnesses from his kindergarten, which has made the winter holiday season much less comfortable than we’re used to: we had to cut short the Christmas Katerini visit, and we’re keeping him home now so we can be sure he doesn’t pick anything else up before our next attempt.

More generally, between my work, Olga’s work, and the ages that Manu and Yannos have reached, we’re finding it very difficult to take time for ourselves. I read rather a lot last year, but it’s all snatched in the cracks and corners around other things: in the last few minutes before falling asleep, or on my phone while waiting for my coffee to boil, or whatever: time that isn’ very useful for anything more structured, such as music practise, writing, or similar. Presumably as the boys get bigger we’ll pass out of this phase, but for the moment it’s a bit of a trial.

Of the three optimistic work-related headings of last year, two have fallen through. EP left Minddistrict mid-year: we still hang out, but for the moment I’m the lone iOS developer at work. (Ahem. We’re hiring.) And we’re stopping holacracy, which leaves me intensely conflicted: on the one hand I still have an idealistic vision of what it could offer, while on the other hand the half-hearted implementation we managed clearly wasn’t doing what it was designed to do. I had a lot emotionally invested in the system, and seeing it fail has made me very unhappy at times during the year. I haven’t learned my lesson at all though: I’m now scrum master for the team I work in, and I’m pouring my idealism into that instead. (Unlike with holacracy, we seem to be seeing immediate tangible benefits, and the effort seems to be appreciated by the organisation as a whole. In one sense I have, after all, learned a lesson: I’m more cautious about forecasting Great Things Coming Real Soon Now.)

My predictions about GTD and meditation got caught up in the slow holacracy crash. The few months I spent GTDing were wonderful, but I fell off the weekly-review wagon and haven’t managed to get back on yet: without that regular review the whole system doesn’t function at all. I do intend to give it another try, but we know about good intentions don’t we?

Thankfully, at least one aspect of my work has stayed completely positive: working with Swift is a joy, and I’ve made enormous progress as an iOS dev in the last year. My next major challenge is to learn what I can from the open-sourcing of the Kickstarter app: I have a hunch that their techniques might let me take another major leap forward in the not-too-distant future.

What I worried about

Holacracy. The rise of fascism. Manu’s tantrums and my own temper.

Last year’s plans

Nope nope nope. My budgeting app still isn’t finished, and won’t be any time soon. I drive a little, but take every opportunity to avoid driving any more. I did swap out Wordpress on this blog (but haven’t yet replaced the rest of the site). And as I mentioned above, my GTD broke and I haven’t fixed it yet, and I never started on meditation.

Let’s finish with something positive

Living in the country is wonderful! We can walk around our neighbourhood with the kids and not be constantly herding them on the sidewalk. There’s even a bloke who walks a donkey past our house every week or two, carrying loads of firewood or sacks of grain. We’re looking forward very much to when it warms up, and the boys can start playing outside without having to layer up first.

I’ve picked up an old dream, and started woodcarving. To be precise: I am about 2/3 through my first piece, which I started in the summer, carved from a piece of oak firewood: that, too, is making progress in tiny spurts, in the cracks between other events. (I have to be outside to work on it, which is trickier in winter.) Tiny achievement though it is, this gives me great pleasure.

And some extremely tentative predictions

2017 will bring a visit from my mother, which we look forward to very much. We’ll try to get back to that beach on the Peloponnesus. Manu will start preschool in September. I’m going to pick up GTD again at some point, and I might just end up trying meditation after all, if nothing knocks me flat before I get to it. I’m also thinking about whether I can use the cracks and stolen moments for something more productive than reading: no conclusions yet, but maybe I come up with something. And everything will start getting easier as the boys get just a little bit older.

2016 reading record

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0200

Just like for 2015, in 2016 I kept a record of the books I read. (At least, most of them: I started the list in late March. It’s pretty comprehensive from then on, though, because I threw together an iOS app which let me enter the details on my phone: this is frictionless enough that I think I missed very few.) The raw data is on github, in the unlikely event anyone else can think of anything to do with it. The list, with notes, is in roughly chronological order but with occasional reshuffling for thematic consistency. I’ve marked with a ☛ any that I think are particularly worth checking out (if you happen to share my taste and interests, anyway).

Some random stats:

62 books started, 56 finished (some I didn’t finish are not included below);
22 books authored by women, 36 by men (plus 3 multi-author collections);
20 books I think the Sad/Rabid Puppies would object to (incidentally, these are skewed towards the female authors).
An A–Z of the Fantastic City, Hal Duncan. This was a chapbook from Small Beer Press. Somehow I didn’t read it when it first arrived: now I rediscovered it, and (unsurprisingly for Hal Duncan) it’s rather more than the title would suggest. (18/03-19/03)
The Mandolin: a history, Graham McDonald. I backed this one as a Kickstarter project. The text is a rather odd mix of kinds of information (histories of companies and brand-names, technical titbits about construction techniques, information about contemporary luthiers, and a short run-through of various related European instruments), but the main attraction for me is the huge number of photographs. I fell in love with plenty of instruments, including the Regal Octophone – luckily none of them are easy to come by. (19/03-06/12)
☛ The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson. Excellent fantasy. You can read the first chapter at Tor.com. (12/04-15/04)
Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, ed. Peter Forbes. This is about the fifth time I’ve tried reading this from the beginning to the end. Didn’t manage this time either. (15/04-)
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente . Reread. This is still as beautiful and unsettling as it was first time around. (17/04-24/05)
Tim Powers. It’s no secret that Tim Powers has a schtick. That’s fine: I like his schtick. (I read somewhere, but can no longer find, a pithy description of his schtick as ‘secret history’: in his novels he takes historical events and imagines new, uncanny motivations for them. I dearly wish he would take on the rivalry between Richard Owen and Gideon Mantell: they feuded over early dinosaur fossils, and after Mantell’s death Owen had a portion of his spine pickled and displayed at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It practically writes itself.)
- The Bible Repairman and other stories. Short works: fewer historical figures, more carefully-realised settings. (30/04-01/05)
- The Stress of Her Regard. Living stones. Hey, there are more of those in this list… (01/05-03/05)
- ☛ Declare. A re-read prompted by the ‘weird spy stuff’ kick of the first two Fractured Europe books (see below). (03/09-08/09)
Robert Silverberg: a series of collections of his short work, chronologically arranged. If I were a devoted Silverberg fan this might have been more satisfying, especially given the anecdotes introducing each story.
- To Be Continued. As it’s the first in the series, it collects stories from the very beginning of his career: perhaps not surprisingly, nothing really excited me. (04/05-08/05)
- Trips. A later collection in the same series, but still not particularly excited: in fact, I didn’t finish this one. (22/05-)
☛ The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar. Magnificent. (08/05-22/05)
The Liminal series, Ayiza Jama-Everett. Good, solid entertainment, and everything the Puppies get so worked-up about, but they have slightly more YA vibe than most of my reading.
- The Liminal People (27/05-28/05)
- The Entropy of Bones (28/05-29/05)
- The Liminal War. (14/12-15/12)
Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand. Part of a Humble Bundle offering books from Small Beer Press. As a long-term Small Beer fan I already owned about half of the books on offer, but this one was new to me. I got seriously wrong-footed by not knowing what genre to expect: I kept expecting something non-naturalistic to appear, and it kept not appearing. (29/05-29/05)
Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer. An abortive re-read. This is lovely, but it strikes a very particular tone, and if you’re not in the mood for that tone, forget it. (29/05-)
A Darker Shade of Magic, Victoria Schwab. I don’t remember much about this. (15/06-15/06)
☛ Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee. This was fun (although rather more grimdark than I like). The death toll (measured, quite literally, in millions) and prevalence of torture makes a bizarre contrast with the playful inventiveness of the setting: I enjoyed the setting a lot more than the grimdarkery. (16/06-21/06)
Tyrannia and Other Renditions, Alan DeNiro. These are terribly depressing, and I think meant to be so. (21/06-30/07)
The Nightmare Stacks, Charles Stross. I like a lot of Stross’s work, and I’ve enjoyed this series (The Laundry Files) thus far, but this one was a disappointment. He introduces the Forecasting Operations Department: precognitives whose main purpose seems to be to fig-leaf the absurd contortions required to arrange one of the weirder set-pieces in the book (involving plate armour and a kettenkrad). The problem with a get-out-of-plot-hole-free card like this is that you may feel tempted to overuse it, and I think he does. (I admit it’s pretty funny to see Alex boggling at the computational complexity implications of a Forecasting Ops Dept that can actually do their job, but even that rather draws attention to the essential problem.) There’s also something rubbing me the wrong way which might have to do with how far into the series this installment comes. It feels like by now Stross is recycling and remixing elements from the series lore, while earlier books added to it: sure the elves are new, but essentially all their terrifying armament is technology we’ve seen before, in very much recognisable form. It felt a bit stale to me, compared to elements like the vampires of The Rhesus Chart or the tongue-eating parasites of The Apocalypse Codex (both of which also, arguably, remixed existing lore elements rather than introducing new ones). (23/06-27/06)
LCRW 34, eds Kelly Link & Gavin Grant. (27/07-28/07)
North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Balingrud. These are some of the nastiest people you will meet in a work of fiction. (30/07-02/08)
N. K. Jemisin
- ☛ The Fifth Season. Spectacular, a well-deserved Hugo winner. (02/08-05/08)
- The Obelisk Gate. Much less impressive than The Fifth Season, mainly because of classic second-book syndrome: the first of the trilogy got to reveal all the juicy secrets about the setting, while much of what this one is doing is setting up the plotlines that will land in the final volume. (21/08-24/08)
Fire Logic, Laurie J. Marks. Another Small Beer addition. I have at least one other from this series, but it’s never really grabbed me. (07/08-08/08)
Peter Watts (thematic grouping)
- ☛ Blindsight, Peter Watts. Excellent (if very pessimistic) SF about the immanent obsolescence of humanity. After the novel come the notes, which show some of the real research he used for inspiration: some fascinating stuff in there too. Free online. (08/08-09/08)
- Permanence, Karl Schroeder. In the notes to Blindsight Watts writes: ‘Parts of Blindsight can be thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl’s novel Permanence; I disagree with his reasoning at almost every step, and am still trying to figure out how we arrived at the same general endpoint.’ But while Blindsight lodged in my memory both as fiction and as speculation, Permanence didn’t really stick as either. (10/08-12/08)
- Echopraxia, Peter Watts. Less philosophically interesting than Blindsight, but just as fun (and with just as bleak a view of humanity’s inevitable obsolescence). (15/11-19/11)
The Fractured Europe sequence, Dave Hutchinson
- ☛ Europe in Autumn. Fun spy stuff in a near-future Europe, and just as you start getting comfortable with that, it gets weird. (26/08-28/08)
- Europe at Midnight. Still fun. (28/08-29/08)
- Europe in Winter. I enjoyed this less than the first two; I also note that it introduces yet another layer of behind-the-scenes manipulation, setting up the continuation of the series. (20/11-22/11)
The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts. This confirms an earlier impression, that I’m not the right audience for what Roberts wants to do. Both his reference-heavy approach in general, and the philosophising in this particular novel, just read to me as shallow. (29/08-02/09)
Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge. I have to admit I first picked this up because her partner wrote Hild, one of my stand-out reads of last year. Lots of my reading features characters that are exceptional in some particular field: a particularly talented wizard, a super-spy, and the like. This one is unusual, for me, in that the field in question is management. Yes, organising-people-into-productive-collectives type management. Even odder: this is not the only protagonist in my year’s reading with an MBA super-skill. (08/09-09/09)
The Moment Under the Moment, Russell Hoban. I love some of Hoban’s work (Riddley Walker in particular, and also How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen from my childhood), but this collection amplifies some of his quirks that rub me up the wrong way. (11/09-16/10)
☛ Underworld, Don DeLillo. Extraordinary, but almost too rich: it took me two months to finish. I particularly enjoyed the dialogue, full of unfinished sentences and non sequiturs. (18/09-26/11)
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson. Angsty. Also very enjoyable, if you can stand the angst. This is the second read of 2016 to feature a super-skilled protagonist with a decidedly non-standard super-skill: this one, clearly genre-marked for fantasy with swords and horses (and colonialism: it’s smart, self-aware fantasy, which might explain some of the angst) features a super-accountant. (19/09-21/09)
The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins. Ugh. That’s the last time I follow Amazon’s people-who-read-also-read recommendations. (In this case it came from Baru Cormorant: I imagine the linking factor is grimdark.) This reminds me of a fabulous essay about Ender’s Game (a book which I devoured and re-read repeatedly in high school), which points out how Card manipulates the setting to provoke a particular moral judgement. In Mount Char we see God (not ‘a god’ as someone like Gaiman might write, but the bearded patriarch you imagine if you got your Bible study at second hand) abusing children, and we’re told in the denouement that despite all His power, the abuse was the only solution He could find to the problem of … arranging a successor when He took retirement. As in the case of Ender’s Game, once you consciously appreciate how the author must have chosen to make this true in their subcreation, you start squinting sideways at said author and edging as subtly and quietly as you possibly can towards the door. (29/09-30/09)
Ammonite, Nicola Griffith. Excellent first novel, showing a lot of the awareness of and appreciation for different ways of being human that made Hild such a joy. (01/10-03/10)
☛ Bone Swans: Stories, C. S. E. Cooney. Very good stories, in the weird/eerie corner. (04/10-08/10)
☛ Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Janssen. Manu is finally old enough to enjoy these (and indeed, to demand repeat readings of the chapter with the Mameluke). A delight as always. (19/10-29/10)
Sorceror to the Crown, Zen Cho. A generally light and pleasant read. (21/10-22/10)
The Fires Beneath the Sea, Lydia Millet. Another Small Beer random acquisition; more YA than my usual fare. (22/10-23/10)
Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison. Seems like a light fairytale, but underneath the surface it has teeth. Beautiful. (26/10-27/10)
☛ What miscellaneous abnormality is that? A field guide with numerous illustrations, Shaun Tan. This booklet comes with the DVD of The Lost Thing, and is an absolute delight. (26/10-27/10)
Seed to Harvest, Octavia E. Butler. What an incredibly bleak view of humanity’s future prospects! One interesting feature of this series is that after starting with a McGuffin and building a coherent world around it, she introduces a second (completely unrelated) McGuffin in the second book, then lets them fight it out in the far future. (27/10-29/10)
☛ The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster. Started reading this with Manu, but stopped pretty quickly: he needs a couple more years yet. (29/10-)
Sarah Caudwell
- Thus was Adonis Murdered. Cosy mystery. The donnish tone had me laughing out loud over the first couple of pages (which was unfortunate, as I was reading in bed and almost woke my wife). (31/10-02/11)
- The Shortest Way to Hades. More of the same. Enough so that I decided not to go looking for yet more of the same after this one. (02/11-03/11)
Water Logic, Laurie J Marks. (05/11-07/11)
Dune, Frank Herbert. Comfort re-read, of one of the classics from my early discovery of science fiction. (07/11-11/11)
Kraken: An Anatomy, China Miéville. This re-read confirms my original impression: messy and rushed, with lots of interesting elements that don’t really cohere. (Annoyingly, I again got fooled by the misplaced line of dialogue: this time because when I encountered it I remembered there was something with that line, and guessed it was probably plot-significant.) (11/11-13/11)
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s voice is a delight, even if I’m extremely unlikely to put her advice to use myself. (22/11-25/11)
An Alphabet of Embers, ed. Rose Lemberg. I picked this one up without much investigation, after noting (a) that it was very cheap and (b) that several writers I’ve enjoyed had contributed. What I hadn’t realised is how short the individual pieces are: it turns out this means they don’t, in general, do much for me. (28/11-)
☛ A Green and Ancient Light, Frederic S Durbin. A stand-out read for the year, discovered via a tweet (thanks @BBolander). I am amazed to see that it was published this year: it has a humble sincerity that I associate with a bygone era (in this respect it reminds me a lot of The Wind in the Willows). I’m looking forward to when Manu is old enough to share it with him. (02/12-04/12)
Alas Vegas, James Wallis. I have a mildly deviant hobby: I like to read the rulebooks for role-playing games, and then not play them. (It’s probably harmless.) The mechanics of this one are quite interesting: there is a quite tightly-controlled storyline, coupled with flashback scenes that are largely player-driven and very loosely controlled. Reading the playbook, though, of course the tightly-controlled storyline takes the front seat, and I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as the author would like me to. (04/12-08/12)
Natural History, Justina Robson. I saw an approving tweet by Charles Stross about the world-building in this SF novel, and was most surprised to discover that I already owned it. It failed to make much of an impression on second reading either, so I suspect I’ll be just as surprised when I rediscover it in another two or three years. (11/12-13/12)
The Lean Startup, Eric Ries. Speed-read over a weekend in Amsterdam (as it belonged to my hosts there). There’s a lot to learn here, but one element raises my hackles: as a programmer I value craft very highly, but I suspect it has very little relevance in the setting he’s describing. (He says exactly the opposite at one point, but I think the argument there is rather weak.) Besides this, however, particularly the observations about metrics (useful versus vanity) struck a chord with me. (17/12-20/12)
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler. Wow, she pulls absolutely no punches doesn’t she? Bleak, bleak, bleak vision of the collapse of American society. It was extremely startling to find ‘Make America Great Again’ as the slogan of a religious demagogue in the excerpt from the sequel (written twenty years or so ago). (20/12-21/12)
LCRW #35, eds Gavin Grant & Kelly Link. (24/12-25/12)
Midnight Riot, Ben Aaronovitch. A fun enough read, but it’s so clearly establishing a franchise that I tried not to get too involved. Also I spotted the puppetry angle long before the protagonist did. (26/12-28/12)
☛ The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi. Rereading these because they are really very clever indeed. (29/12-03/01)

A blog overhaul

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 22:54:33 +0200

I just deleted my wordpress blog. And I felt a great weight lift off my shoulders!

What remains are plain html pages, generated with jekyll. That has some downsides; in particular: no commenting. I’ve preserved all existing comments, but I didn’t build anything to add new ones. I rather suspect I won’t: it’s the sort of job that balloons on you, and I don’t really want to go back to playing tag with spammers. I still have to figure out what will replace the occasional warm fuzzies I got from reading comments from the faithful few who still follow along here, though.

There are definitely some rough edges remaining. There are broken links all over the place, because I didn’t think about the difference between a-post-url and a-post-url (and a-post-url.html for that matter). The styling is, erm, “basic” is the nice way of putting it. It doesn’t even match the rest of the site! … Oh, there’s a rest of the site that really should be under jekyll too. So there’s some work to do. That’s ok. Since I started using GTD I’ve rather quickly gotten better at making slow-but-steady progress on things: I think I’ll get it fixed up, eventually.

2015 reading record

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 05:03:33 +0200

Since just after Christmas 2014 I’ve been keeping a reading diary: nothing fancy, just title, author, and date I finished reading each book.

Christmas 2015 I made it fancy. The records are now kept in json, and I’m putting together a tiny python toolkit for mangling them in various ways. Useful? Probably not. Fun? Yep!

So here is a mostly-complete list of what I read in 2015, in roughly chronological order but with occasional reshuffling for thematic consistency. I’ve marked with a ☛ any that I think are particularly worth checking out (if you happen to share my taste and interests, anyway).

Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. I’ve written about this.
- Issola.
- Dzur.
- Jhegaala.
- Iorich.
- Tiassa.
- Hawk.
☛ Hild, Nicola Griffith. Historical fiction about the early life of a seventh-century saint. Wonderfully immersive.
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield. You know, @Cmdr_Hadfield, who sang “Space Oddity” on the ISS. A combination autobiography and advice manual.
Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, Thomas Metzinger. Philosophy of mind; very thought-provoking, but also classically alienating academic writing: prissy, boring at the sentence level, and very very long.
Household Tales, The brothers Grimm. The edition with the foreword by Russell Hoban, which is nuts.
Series A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by David Zindell. I thought I had started but not finished this series repeatedly over the years; turns out I had finished it but forgotten most of the plot. Turgid.
- Neverness.
- The Broken God.
- The Wild.
- War in Heaven.
☛ The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton. 2013 Man Booker winner. Set in the goldfields of Hokatika; beautiful prose, and a clever and intricate formal structure.
Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross. SF focusing on the economics of interstellar travel. Stross is a favourite relaxation read of mine.
The River Singers, Tom Moorhouse. YA about water voles (what Ratty from Wind in the Willows was). Author is a friend.
Echopraxia, Peter Watts. SF about the imminent obsolescence of humanity.
The Dalkey Archive, Flann O’Brien. Irish absurdism. Not as good as The Third Policeman, despite giving De Selby a speaking part.
Going Postal, Terry Pratchett. Dipping my toes back into Pratchett’s world to mark his passing.
☛ The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman. Weird Wild West done very very well.
In Viriconium, M. John Harrison. This might be my favourite of his so far: a weird, moody, grotesque piece. More than a hint of Gormenghast, but much more compact and focused. And shorter.
Maze, J. M. McDermott. Came highly recommended; did not quite succeed for me. I see the ambition, but the execution seems slightly off somehow. I wish I could pin down how, though: not being able to leaves me with the nagging feeling that maybe it’s not the book’s fault, maybe it’s me.
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon. A joy as always (and as always, a bit of a struggle in the last third or so).
The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein. I’ve seen this one referenced as the kind of thing the Sad Puppies hate, and also as a clever fantasy/sf hybrid, with the genre balance shifting as the series progresses. I enjoyed it, but not enough to grab the rest of the series just yet.
Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees. A fairy story, of the Strange & Norrell flavour of fairies (indeed, I was probably pointed to it as an influence on Strange & Norrell). Maintains a surprising level of tension, and generally refuses to live up to all sorts of expectations. I keep wanting to use the word “odd” about this one.
From the Hugo voters pack:
- Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick, Fraction & Zdarsky. A comic; fun enough, but did not send me looking for more.
- The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu. I can’t help wondering if this one would still have won the Hugo if it weren’t for the puppies piddling on everything. The SF setup seemed straight out of a bygone era.
- The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Not much of this one stuck with me. I think I recall feeling my belief suspenders slipping at just how effectively the protagonist overcomes the prejudice against him.
- The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson. Gave up on this one, simply awful.
☛ Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr (who was actually Alice Sheldon). A short story collection: these are so good, and so awfully depressing.
The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne. Lots of people were talking about it, so I read it. I felt stupid for not anticipating the various twists earlier.
Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian. The first time I read this series I devoured them compulsively, reading late into the night. Turns out these don’t work nearly as well for me warmed over. This probably means I’ll never finish the series.
The trilogy called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (by Tad Williams), whose books (against all logic) are not called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. YA fantasy, a bog-standard coming-of-age tale, with a twist that surprised and delighted me when I was 16 but is somewhat easier to see coming on a second reading at age 34.
- The Dragonbone Chair.
- Stone of Farewell.
- To Green Angel Tower.
To the Is-Land, Janet Frame. Autobiography of a famous New Zealand writer. She has an incredible eye for vivid, surprising detail. The following two volumes are in my bookshelf.
Charles Stross’s Laundry series is a funny beast: spy stuff meets Cthulhu mythos with a side-dose of computer-geek. The series started campy and fun (which is how I usually like my Cthulhu mythos), but it seems like somewhere along the line Stross started taking the implications seriously: the setting is getting darker with each book, and the characters are getting more rounded and realistic (with all the warts that implies).
- The Rhesus Chart. The last-but-one volume in the series, read as a warm-up for the new release.
- The Annihilation Score. The new release.
Vellum: The Book of All Hours, Hal Duncan. Several kinds of complex formal structure combine to make this pure nerd-snipery for me. I re-read it before starting some structural analyses, then semi-re-re-read it by accident while doing the analyses.
Shipwrecked on the Top of the World, David Roberts. This was a lot of fun: a simple story of polar survival, but wrapped around in the author’s research project to verify it.
Straggletaggle, J. M. McDermott. Again McDermott didn’t quite manage to click for me. This one was recommended to me for taking steampunk to its logical, horrible, extreme. It does that, indeed.
The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. Did not convince me: the philosophy it espouses is so clearly set up to be able to dismiss any potential challenge or disagreement without examining its merits. I did get a laugh from seeing the author’s musical prejudices wrapped up in Taoist jargon though.
Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer. Best VanderMeer I’ve read so far. Previous work of his (City of Saints and Madmen and various short pieces) has reified its themes too clumsily for my taste (fungus! and, in Ambergris, giant squid!). While Area X still puts its themes explicitly into its setting, they are less easy to sum up (and thus dismiss) in a noun phrase.
☛ The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt. Extraordinary.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, ed. Gardner Dozois. I think I bought this for the Ted Chiang (The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate) which is, indeed, wonderful.
Skylark of Valeron, E.E. “Doc” Smith. I re-read Doc Smith periodically, to remind myself not to be a snob. They’re terrible, but terribly fun: the trick is to enjoy them for what they are and not feel guilty for the enjoyment.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin. Another “lots of people talk about this, I should read it” pick, marked down at the American Book Centre in Amsterdam. I see why people talk about it: it tackles head-on a bunch of themes that should make an awful lot of fantasy writers rather uncomfortable. Suffers a bit from the standard problem of writing about gods: it’s hard to keep a balance between humanising them too much on the one hand, and drowning them in justified but ineffective superlatives on the other. There are a few moments near the end where I felt the age and power of the god-characters, but many more where I was told to feel them but didn’t.
The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1), Charles Stross. Dipping my toes back into another of Stross’s series, to see if I enjoy it more a second time around. Conclusion: nope, not for me.
S (Ship of Theseus), Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams. Magnificent concept, beautiful object, fails as fiction. This is a gorgeous thing: a hardcover book purportedly published in 1949, with handwritten notes in the margins telling a second story and various objects (postcards, maps, a cipher wheel) tucked between the pages. I think what failed for me is how transparently the handwritten notes exist for the story: in theory these are two people writing to each other, but they are too clearly Doug Dorst writing to the reader.
Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway. Light, fun. Uses the word “stricture” in an interesting way, and manages to make the noise of a passing train sexy.
Anathem, Neal Stephenson. Nerdery. Tricks the same bits of my mind that philosophy tricks, that are really supposed to focus on intellectual rigour. This is a super-stimulus problem, a bit like how we like sugar much much much more than is good for us now that we can get it whenever we want to. Anyway, the upshot is that I enjoyed this for its ideas, and managed to ignore the plotting and characterisation.
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek. Describes a perfect workplace, from the perspective of an employee. I don’t think it makes a compelling case for the benefits to management, but it’s inspiring nonetheless.
The Effective Executive, Peter F Drucker. There’s a lot of good advice in this book (don’t be put off by the title: “executive” as he uses it basically just means “person who makes decisions in their work”). I was massively distracted, though, by its dated language: the executive is always “he”, and often “a man”; I was honestly surprised by how uncomfortable this felt to me.
☛ The Ancillary trilogy, by Ann Leckie. The third instalment was published in October, and I devoured it then re-read the first two immediately. This is space opera at its best: exciting plots on a grand scale, and at the same time some seriously interesting variations on the question of personal identity. (My favourite SF lives up to the “literature of ideas” notion.) I love the Presger Translator characters.
- Ancillary Mercy.
- Ancillary Justice.
- Ancillary Sword.
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Robert C “Uncle Bob” Martin. I got something from this, but it is very clearly located (I almost wrote “stuck”) in the object-oriented paradigm: if you’re not working there, some of the advice needs to be rotated through a few dimensions to make sense.
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman. I suppose this deserves its classic status, but I can’t say I was terribly thrilled. Perhaps its because its message seems at the same time blindingly obvious (it was written in response to the Vietnam war) and only marginally relevant to today’s Western world.
☛ The Annals of the Parrigues, Emily Short. A guidebook to an imaginary place featuring substantial amounts of generated text; as you would expect from Emily Short there’s also a story woven in. After the guidebook she writes about the techniques she used for the generated text, which is fascinating.
☛ The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Andrew Hunt & David Thomas. Now this is more like it! I wish I had read this one a few years back: in the meantime I’ve accumulated much of the same advice, but piecemeal and much more slowly. I recommend this one to any early-career programmer. It’s slightly dated in parts (the advice on version control apparently predates git) but basically solid.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Gave up at 41%. He has interesting things to say, but recycling blog posts means he says each of them 17 times. When you start watching the progress bar and longing for 50%, it’s time to cut and run.
Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace. I’m a fan of Small Beer Press, who published this one. Increasingly these days I’m uncomfortable with fictional portrayals of abuse, when it seems to be used casually. (I’m not sure what’s changed in my sensibilities; perhaps having children has an effect.) The brutality of the protagonist’s situation as the novel opens triggered this discomfort, and I never quite shook it off.
How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff. A quick and simple guide to scepticism about reported statistics. A bit dry, but it’s very short.
☛ The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman. The publication date (before the PC revolution really took hold, and long before the iPhone) make for some amusing predictions (both hits and misses). The major themes are as relevant as they always were, though.

2015: Year in Review

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 00:49:46 +0200

The last two years I’ve written a short retrospective. Three times makes it a habit, I guess.

Pride of place goes to the arrival of Yannos Nikau in July. We didn’t think a more easygoing baby than Manu was even possible, let alone likely, but Nikau is exactly that: constantly cheerful, uses crying as a second resort when he needs something, and (most importantly) he sleeps easily and soundly through most of the night. It’s usually the parents that spoil the child, but in our case the roles are reversed.

Thematic unity

The dominant theme of 2015 is a cliché of family life: Mum and Dad off at work, Grandma flaked out on the couch with the baby asleep on top of her, and the youngster playing on the carpet amid a chaos of toys, books and colouring pens, with hands all colours of the rainbow.

Two, it turns out, is a bit trickier to manage than one.

Especially if the second arrival narrowly precedes a job offer that is everything Mum wanted for her career, except it comes one year earlier than is entirely convenient. So Olga is teaching again (part-time so far, expected to go full-time mid-2016), and we’ve sent Manu to kindergarten three days a week and called in Grandma for babysitting. The details of this arrangement are still a work in progress; I expect we’ll have it mostly figured out by the time Olga goes fulltime, at which point of course we’ll need a new arrangement.

Last year’s plans

Again the score is somewhat mixed.

Finishing things: not really but a bit. I did indeed pass my driving exam; I drive sometimes, but still reluctantly and with stress levels approaching the ridiculous. I rewrote my iOS app in Swift: it’s more or less functionally complete (I’m using it myself and making small additions every few weeks) but the UI is deliberately pre-alpha quality. I have a willing guinea pig and intend to paper-prototype with him to figure out what the real UI should look like: this is a slow process (made slower by my lack of facility with the UI bits of iOS), but 2016 should see an app store release.

Staying home: Yannos Nikau saw to that! We had a delightful visit from my parents in May, and spent a week in the mountains (Zagorochoria) and a week by the sea (Chalkidiki). Apart from that we were in Katerini for a long baby-related visit, and Thessaloniki for the rest of the year. This also only counts as partial success, though, because the reason to wanted to stay home was to get to know our surroundings better: two children with radically different sleep schedules have rather put a damper on that plan.

Financial stability: here we’ve made some definite progress. Again Yannos Nikau deserves some credit: not dashing all over the globe helps financially, as does staying in nights. We did improve in our own right, though, at spending mindfully instead of at whim. I’m proud to say my iOS app has had some impact there!

Makam theory started (I took some lavta lessons) then stalled around the time Nikau arrived. My last lesson left me with the challenge to play a taximi in uşşâk makam. Given my lack of attention to the lavta it’s no surprise that I haven’t done this to my own satisfaction yet; when I do I’ll go back to my teacher for another lesson.

What I worried about

This year I worried a fair bit about our financial situation. Unusually for me, the worrying got results: between a pay rise for me, Olga’s part-time work, a bit more attention to our spending, and the enforced quieter lifestyle with two youngsters, I’ve stopped worrying.

I worried about the political situation in Greece: I cheered for the “όχι” vote and booed the troika, and I’m still deeply disappointed by the failure of Europe’s various political structures to see past their short-term and local interests. The situation is no better, but I’ve largely stopped following the details, and (in consequence) largely stopped worrying. There seems to be no realistic hope for serious improvement, so worrying is completely wasted effort; at the same time, we’re in the extraordinarily privileged position of living here without the political situation causing us much direct difficulty. This is what political disengagement looks like: theoretically speaking I don’t like that, but the values embodied in my day-to-day choices simply don’t prioritise politics that highly.

I worried about awards for speculative fiction. This is something else I probably won’t worry about in future: like Gamergate, it’s become just part of the background awfulness of my internet-and-social-media environment. (NB: I am fully aware of my privilege in being able to ignore this stuff.) I hope the Hugos get fixed, but if they don’t, my recommended-reading list is long enough to keep me happy for several years yet.

Last year I worried that I was giving myself too much leisure time compared to family time. That’s still a concern, and will become more of one as Olga’s work takes more of her time. I hope to solve it by quantifying and prioritising my leisure activities (making it easier to set reasonable limits on them), and by making my non-leisure activities more focused and effective. I will be assisted in this effort by the demands of practicality, since Olga will no longer be able to pick up my slack.

Last year I also worried more generally about geopolitics, global warming, patriarchy, capitalism, and the theory expounded in The Collapse of Complex Societies. I continue to worry about that lot. The specific question that is gradually (and very slowly) crystalising out of the murk is how to relate those concerns to my life. This is a work in (very early stages of) progress.

2015 saw three major changes in my work at Minddistrict: we hired EP into the iOS team, we started programming in Swift, and the company switched its internal structure to Holacracy. All three of these have been massively positive moves from my perspective.

Pairing all the way

EP joined the team as a senior iOS developer: as I’m the junior iOS dev, we spend a lot of time together. Even more time than you might expect: he defaults to pair programming (whereas I used to use it only as a last resort), which is often exhausting but also often incredibly productive. And (this is maybe the most important bit) it’s fun: we’re learning together, we joke around, we dive off on side tangents because they look interesting. We also keep each other honest, both in the code and out of it. While EP is a much more experienced iOS programmer than I am, the most important things I’m learning from him are more abstract: things like his relentless positivity and enthusiasm, his willingness to reexamine his beliefs, and his experience with various agile methodologies all add up to a colleague who would be an inspiration even if he had none of the technical knowledge that he has.

EP, if you’re reading this: thanks man! Looking forward to working with you in the new year!

Swiftly onwards

Swift suits me much, much better than Objective C. I like strong typing and type inference; I like pure functions; those likes come from liking Haskell, but I never managed to use Haskell for anything except playing-with-Haskell exercises. Turns out I like extensions too (it’s lovely to add a new feature that touches several existing classes, and to have all the code for that feature in one new file), and I confidently expect to like protocol extensions even more (we only just got our dependencies updated to Swift 2, so this is a prediction for 2016).

Although I’ve spent more than a year with Objective C and only six months or less with Swift, I already feel much more comfortable in Swift. Much of our codebase is still Objective C, but it now feels uncomfortable to modify it; even more so, it feels like failure if we’re writing new code and we fall back to Objective C for it. It will be a long time before the last .m file is gone from our repo, but I’m looking forward to it.

Hola-what-now?

For about six months now Minddistrict has operated using Holacracy for our organisational structure. It hasn’t been an entirely smooth transition, but so far the benefits I see (and anticipate) outweigh the downsides, for me at least. (I’ve picked up the “rules of the game” easily, and I see how to use them to get the things I need. Others who can’t see that structure as easily, or aren’t willing to invest time in understanding it, find the rules an obstacle rather than a tool and end up fighting the structure. This is the biggest downside we’ve seen so far: if you have team members who don’t manage to adopt the holacracy structure, but you commit to using that structure, the team cohesion suffers a lot.)

In my case holacracy gave me a mechanism to try an organisational experiment: I proposed to form a Mobile Dev Circle (“circle” is holacracy jargon for “team”, roughly), and we’re trying to run it more “agile” than the dev team as a whole. The pudding is barely weeks old, so 2016 will provide the proof, but it’s massively exciting to me that I could set this in motion so easily, thanks to the way holacracy works.

I also have a substantial to-read list from Cate Huston, after she give me a more sceptical take on holacracy. By now I’m so emotionally invested in holacracy that I doubt this will make me back off from it, but I also have high hopes that there is space within the structure holacracy provides to deal with her concerns.

Leveling up

Between EP’s influence and stepping up to the holacracy challenge, I feel like my work contribution has taken a significant step forward in the second half of 2015. Swift makes me a better coder, but EP and holacracy are making me more aware of what I’m coding for. I intend to nurture this growth spurt in the year to come: here’s hoping the results are visible before the end of 2016!

Predictions for 2016

Let’s not call these “plans”: these are the things I anticipate wanting to write about in the next “year in review” post.

Parenting. Olga will work fulltime in late 2016, by which time Yannos will be mobile and Manu will be old enough to want to babysit, but not old enough to let him do it. What happens to our household routine to make that work is anybody’s guess. It’s gonna be big, I can promise that.
Finishing that iOS app. It’s all UX and UI now; I aim to get it into the app store before this time next year.
Retiring, then reinvigorating, this blog. I would like to represent myself professionally, as well as personally, here. That means a change of tooling (bye-bye wordpress) and a bit of attention to content, as well as a more regular posting schedule. I don’t want or need a “brand”, but what I do want (focus) might look like one from the outside.
Leveling up, at work and at home. Holacracy is a gateway drug: I see Getting Things Done and quantified-self notions (especially related to my health and fitness) on the horizon. Prediction (not plan): I’m guessing this year I’ll make a serious attempt at meditation of some kind.

Rust

Sun, 11 Oct 2015 07:38:28 +0300

Tom recently visited this site’s landing page and kindly pointed out that it had been replaced by a torrent of PHP errors. (My hosting provider updated their PHP version: I checked the blog, but not the site itself. Oops.)

I’ve fixed the immediate problem, but in a rather rough-and-ready manner which has disabled some minor functionality in the rest of the site. (“Minor functionality”: footnotes, table-of-contents, and images are no longer shown.) I don’t have any interest whatsoever in maintaining the tech, so I’ll be looking for a way to snapshot the content and convert what is worth saving to static html. In the meantime, if things look a bit shabby then it’s not unexpected, but if you hit a wall of error messages then please let me know, it will mean I missed something.

(b)logophile

#JustPlay

2017: Year in Review

Media consumption

Media production and creativity

What I worried about

What’s coming up?

2017 reading record

Winter Tide (subverting a Mythos)

2016: Year in Review

Start with the good

The less good: the saga of the internet

More less good: taxes

Even more less good: health scares and babysitting

Work-related

What I worried about

Last year’s plans

Let’s finish with something positive

And some extremely tentative predictions

2016 reading record

A blog overhaul

2015 reading record

2015: Year in Review

Thematic unity

Last year’s plans

What I worried about

Work and related

Pairing all the way

Swiftly onwards

Hola-what-now?

Leveling up

Predictions for 2016

Rust