Dream Foo + Book Foo
Apr. 30th, 2006 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6First the dream. Was a fairly detailed one, though I don't know where any of it came from.
Okay. In the dream there was this radio show. And for some reason, after hearing it once, I went to a recording of it (it was a sort of radio show with a live studio audience type thing).
Now, this is weird for 2 reasons. 1) I pretty well never listen to the radio. I haven't listened to anything on the radio, save for riding in someone else's car, in like 3 or 4 years I think. 2) Even if I did, I'd never be at all interested in going live.
Anyway, at least part of it was sort of a 'funny skits' type thing, sort of like SNL or MadTV. In fact, one of the guys from MadTV was one of the 3 main 'hosts' (this at least makes some kind of sense, since I was watching MadTV just before bed). The other two main people were a father and daughter team, the father like 40ish (and like almost stereotypically italian or spanish but I can't for the life of me remember exactly which, just that he was a typical media example of it) and the daughter 20ish (there was also another guy who just seemed to spout a particular catch phrase (also can't remember), at regular intervals).
Anyway, I was watching the live performance (which seemed to make sense in the dream though I can't remember any of it now so it was probably nonsense), and about this time I realized that it was actually being recorded in my house. Well, not completely my house, it was a house actually owned by my father but that I kept a bunch of my stuff in and had the right to come and go as I pleased. Except I'd never been here before. There were a few times I couldn't hear what was going on so I had a little pocket radio with headphones to pick up the broadcast of it, except midway in the show I lost it somehow.
After the show was over people started filing out, but I wandered over to the bookcase where I had a lot of books of mine and started looking through them and found one I'd been looking for (Battle Royale), although the way it was wedged into the bookshelf it damaged it and tore off the cover (possible transformed guilt over slightly tearing the cover of Deepness in the Sky while it was in my coat pocket).
Anyway, the girl in the show came up to tell me I couldn't take the books, and I was about to say that actually I could, since they were mine, but before I could some guy who handled the renting of the house to the radio people (who looked like a combination Denny from Gray's Anatomy and John Winchester from Supernatural) came down and explained it for me which I was kinda annoyed it because I'd thought up a cool way to say it. Anyway, I also remembering talking to a few people who were big fans and they asked if I was too, and I kept saying that it was actually only the second time I heard the show.
The last person to ask me of it was the girl in the show, and I was starting to talk to her when I ran into one of my stepbrothers and his wife and kid and said hello, and that's about where I woke up.
*shrug*.
Anyway, Book Foo. I've finished: A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge and The Timeline Wars by John Barnes (reading different books on different days, etc). Both rereads.
Now I'm reading two new (to me) books: The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon, about (and told mostly through the perspective of) an autistic, but functional, man who is offered (and pressured into accepting) a treatment to make him 'normal', and On The Beach, by Nevil Shute, another post-apocalyptic tale about the last survivors of a Nuclear War, but who know that they're all going to die in a matter of month when the winds carry the radioactive dust to them. Should be interesting.
Some thoughts on A Deepness in the Sky (spoilery for one particular element, but not huge spoilers as the element is introduced fairly early), behind the cut:
Good book. Like A Fire Upon the Deep I liked it better the second time around because I was able to appreciate how certain things were done.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
occamsnailfile mentioned in my comments about that having trouble because the Qeng Ho didn't seem at all prepared for other human civilizations carrying weird alien bugs, and it's a fair criticism but easy enough for me at least to gloss over (they mentioned the Qeng Ho could tell that the Emergents didn't have any bioengineering ability, and since the mindrot was essentially a complete fluke of a virus that they managed to contain it might not have been anticipated).
Anyway, Focus again is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Can't help almost wanting something like that to exist, but only if it was easily reversible, the kind of thing where you could turn on focus for a day and then go off. Although I suppose if they _did_ do that there'd be a natural consequence of forced focusings at work. Come to work, get Focused, do your job with exceptionally singlemindedness, get unfocused, and go home. And that would be bad for a whole host of reasons. So it's probably best that it doesn't (yet). Still there would be a kind of appeal in being able to voluntarily do it.
It did occur to me that due to the phenomenon of 'freaks connected by the internet' we almost have a focused-like effect, in only a few areas and on a much more limited scale. I mean, take a show like Lost. All kinds of hidden clues and connections in there. Probably hard for any one person to catch all of them. Yet by following forums you can very quickly learn about most of them very shortly after an episode airs, due to a whole lot of people noticing small bits. One person notices and writes down the occurences of The Numbers. Another notices when a person in a flashback is a supporting character in another character's backstory. So all together you get the utility of dedicated freaks analyzing every bit of the show for you. Get a network large enough and you might be able to find obsessive freaks who'll help you with your own projects just because it amuses them. Sort of like SETI@home and other distributed computing projects, except with human brains picking out the things that computers aren't good at. I expect corporations will eventually begin exploiting this ability and cloaking the projects as 'games' and 'contests'.
No social interaction to speak of today, sadly, as none the people who I occasionally talk to before work showed up today, so just the talk with people I actually work with, which isn't the same thing. Though we did crack up a bit remembering that in the old GI JOE cartoon movie Cobra's battlecry was 'Cobra-LALALALA!'
Oh, and I went back and redid one of my old icons (the Chase/Gert one I'm using now) because I've learned some things since then and got it looking much better. Can't directly compare old vs new cause I just copied right over it, but trust me, it's much better.
Okay. In the dream there was this radio show. And for some reason, after hearing it once, I went to a recording of it (it was a sort of radio show with a live studio audience type thing).
Now, this is weird for 2 reasons. 1) I pretty well never listen to the radio. I haven't listened to anything on the radio, save for riding in someone else's car, in like 3 or 4 years I think. 2) Even if I did, I'd never be at all interested in going live.
Anyway, at least part of it was sort of a 'funny skits' type thing, sort of like SNL or MadTV. In fact, one of the guys from MadTV was one of the 3 main 'hosts' (this at least makes some kind of sense, since I was watching MadTV just before bed). The other two main people were a father and daughter team, the father like 40ish (and like almost stereotypically italian or spanish but I can't for the life of me remember exactly which, just that he was a typical media example of it) and the daughter 20ish (there was also another guy who just seemed to spout a particular catch phrase (also can't remember), at regular intervals).
Anyway, I was watching the live performance (which seemed to make sense in the dream though I can't remember any of it now so it was probably nonsense), and about this time I realized that it was actually being recorded in my house. Well, not completely my house, it was a house actually owned by my father but that I kept a bunch of my stuff in and had the right to come and go as I pleased. Except I'd never been here before. There were a few times I couldn't hear what was going on so I had a little pocket radio with headphones to pick up the broadcast of it, except midway in the show I lost it somehow.
After the show was over people started filing out, but I wandered over to the bookcase where I had a lot of books of mine and started looking through them and found one I'd been looking for (Battle Royale), although the way it was wedged into the bookshelf it damaged it and tore off the cover (possible transformed guilt over slightly tearing the cover of Deepness in the Sky while it was in my coat pocket).
Anyway, the girl in the show came up to tell me I couldn't take the books, and I was about to say that actually I could, since they were mine, but before I could some guy who handled the renting of the house to the radio people (who looked like a combination Denny from Gray's Anatomy and John Winchester from Supernatural) came down and explained it for me which I was kinda annoyed it because I'd thought up a cool way to say it. Anyway, I also remembering talking to a few people who were big fans and they asked if I was too, and I kept saying that it was actually only the second time I heard the show.
The last person to ask me of it was the girl in the show, and I was starting to talk to her when I ran into one of my stepbrothers and his wife and kid and said hello, and that's about where I woke up.
*shrug*.
Anyway, Book Foo. I've finished: A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge and The Timeline Wars by John Barnes (reading different books on different days, etc). Both rereads.
Now I'm reading two new (to me) books: The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon, about (and told mostly through the perspective of) an autistic, but functional, man who is offered (and pressured into accepting) a treatment to make him 'normal', and On The Beach, by Nevil Shute, another post-apocalyptic tale about the last survivors of a Nuclear War, but who know that they're all going to die in a matter of month when the winds carry the radioactive dust to them. Should be interesting.
Some thoughts on A Deepness in the Sky (spoilery for one particular element, but not huge spoilers as the element is introduced fairly early), behind the cut:
Good book. Like A Fire Upon the Deep I liked it better the second time around because I was able to appreciate how certain things were done.
occamsnailfile mentioned in my comments about that having trouble because the Qeng Ho didn't seem at all prepared for other human civilizations carrying weird alien bugs, and it's a fair criticism but easy enough for me at least to gloss over (they mentioned the Qeng Ho could tell that the Emergents didn't have any bioengineering ability, and since the mindrot was essentially a complete fluke of a virus that they managed to contain it might not have been anticipated). Anyway, Focus again is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Can't help almost wanting something like that to exist, but only if it was easily reversible, the kind of thing where you could turn on focus for a day and then go off. Although I suppose if they _did_ do that there'd be a natural consequence of forced focusings at work. Come to work, get Focused, do your job with exceptionally singlemindedness, get unfocused, and go home. And that would be bad for a whole host of reasons. So it's probably best that it doesn't (yet). Still there would be a kind of appeal in being able to voluntarily do it.
It did occur to me that due to the phenomenon of 'freaks connected by the internet' we almost have a focused-like effect, in only a few areas and on a much more limited scale. I mean, take a show like Lost. All kinds of hidden clues and connections in there. Probably hard for any one person to catch all of them. Yet by following forums you can very quickly learn about most of them very shortly after an episode airs, due to a whole lot of people noticing small bits. One person notices and writes down the occurences of The Numbers. Another notices when a person in a flashback is a supporting character in another character's backstory. So all together you get the utility of dedicated freaks analyzing every bit of the show for you. Get a network large enough and you might be able to find obsessive freaks who'll help you with your own projects just because it amuses them. Sort of like SETI@home and other distributed computing projects, except with human brains picking out the things that computers aren't good at. I expect corporations will eventually begin exploiting this ability and cloaking the projects as 'games' and 'contests'.
No social interaction to speak of today, sadly, as none the people who I occasionally talk to before work showed up today, so just the talk with people I actually work with, which isn't the same thing. Though we did crack up a bit remembering that in the old GI JOE cartoon movie Cobra's battlecry was 'Cobra-LALALALA!'
Oh, and I went back and redid one of my old icons (the Chase/Gert one I'm using now) because I've learned some things since then and got it looking much better. Can't directly compare old vs new cause I just copied right over it, but trust me, it's much better.
