Hung over

Ugh, I'm hung over this morning. And not for the reasons you'd think. I slept terribly poorly Sunday night, waking around 3 am to a nasty allergy attack as well as back pain. I was reasonably functional Monday, but sleep deprivation catches up on me pretty fast.

lisakit invited us all over for dinner last night, and she made a very yummy stew that I ate quite a bit of. Thanks, Lisa! But when I got home, I immediately started getting ready for bed, and in order to make sure that I'd sleep through the night I took a half dose of the Tylenol clone of Nytol, "Simply Sleep."

Sure, it works. That and a hot chocolate before bed knock me right out. On the other hand, it leaves me hung over the following day. I'm awake, I'm functional, I seem to have all of my faculties, but underneath it all I can't concentrate and I can't create. I have no access at all to my usual creative facilities. Words come at the rate of one a minute, not the usual twenty or thirty. And oddly, it's not frustrating, because I'm too tamped down by the hangover to get frustrated over it. It's more an Eeyore-level acceptance of things the way they are.

Well, maybe I'll get over it soon. Hope so. It's so annoying.

Review: Saturn's Children, by Charlie Stross

I read Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross last week, and after having thought about it some, I've come to the conclusion that the book is shallower than I wanted it to be.

The book follows the adventures of Freya Nakamichi, a sex 'droid designed to please her human masters. Unfortunately for Freya, human beings have been extinct for two centuries or so, leaving us with a character with no idea what to do with her life. Most robots designed to serve human beings were cute, anime-like designs for household use, but Freya's shaped like the real deal, a tall ogre out of place in a world of short bishi and chibi designs. Depressed and despondent, she takes a job as a courier, winds up in all kinds of trouble, and ends up careering around the solar system, gets possessed by the spirit of her dead sisters, and eventually comes face-to-face with the biggest dream and fear every robot has: meeting a real live human being.

Unfortunately, this book falls off the end of the world toward the last chapters. Up until the info-dump where Freya reveals the true nature of robot devotion to human beings, a ham-handed scene if ever there was one (although fortunately the worst of it is ob skene), I was convinced that Charlie was going somewhere interesting with the book. Charlie mentioned that the book is an homage to Robert Heinlein (and the final set piece of the book is set in Heinleingrad, Eris), and the end of the book is as unconvincing as the ending of Freya's namesake novel, Heinlein's Friday. At the end of Friday, you might recall, the titular character ends up marrying the guy who raped her at the beginning of the book ("it was just business") and running away to some far away stellar colony, leaving Earth to collapse under its own corruption. The ending of Saturn's Children ends with a very similar, and even more serious problem, left unresolved: robots who are honest with themselves about their origins are terrified that H. Sapiens might someday re-emerge and assert their right to rule, disrupting the free will of the machines. It's presented as the central conflict of the main character, emerging throughout the book, growing in intensity as Freya gets closer and closer to meeting an authentic H. sap, only to be ignored in the final two chapters in favor of pyrotechnics and "aww, aren't they sweet" moments.

Charlie's ability to create engaging, intense, and intensely clever tight spots from which his heroine must escape, often with that classic transition, frying pan, fire, is here in all its glory. He does a great job of cranking up both the threat and the resolution, over and over again, while weaving a Sol-spanning conspiracy that should ultimately leave you breathless. Charlie knows how to dress the stage and then set the furniture ablaze a la Jack Bickham, and his technical hard SF knowledge is second to none. But if Saturn's Children is a Heinlein pastiche and an Asimov homage, it's also unfortunately got something else: A Neal Stephenson ending.

I bring you.... The Future!

2010: Steve Jobs unveiled the first subcutaneous bluetooth implant for the iPhone. The device, looking like two stacked half-dollar coins with a rounded top, is to be implanted under the skin against the mastoid bone and can be recharged by a transcutaneous magnetic recharger in only twenty minutes.

2011: Apple defended itself against the charge that the battery on the iPhone implant fails too quickly and needs to be replaced more often than indicated in their marketing materials.

2012: Apple unveils iGlasses, stylish wrap-around glasses that decorate your world with the labels and signs you need to navigate it effectively. Apple also unveils iFeel, a collection of locality implants for the fingertips. "With iGlasses, iFeel, and your iPhone, the world becomes a different place, more vibrant, more colorful. Art you never knew existed and could not know existed becomes not merely visible, but touchable."

2013: Microsoft's competing product, the Zision "Vision Enhancement Product," includes innovative products that, combined with their recent purchase of Epoc Corp. (developer of the first effective brain-to-storage transcutaneous imaging system), allows them to "squirt" images and sounds from within their own imaginations to anyone within 10 meters wearing a Zision.

2014: Microsoft defends itself against the most massive class-action lawsuit in history, as millions of women who bought the Zision sue Microsoft for "insufficient safeguards that subjected them to wide and pervasive sexual harassament." A spokeswoman for the law firm of Schwartz & O'Hare said, "Not since the closing of the last harem has a national and trusted institution such as Microsoft forced such hostile and constant sexual harassment on women. We always knew that some men were pigs who undressed us with their eyes and imagined us in degrading positions, but it took incompetence at Microsoft to reveal how pervasive, explicit, and disgusting men can be."

2015: Apple reveals iThink, a competitor to the Zision's mind-recording capabilities that includes parental-control safeguards, content awareness, and buddy lists.

2016: Apple and Blizzard defend themselves against the charge that the iSuite of audio and tactile implants, video overlays, entertainment and communication nexus tools is too effective. The charge is lead by the family of Lawrence J. Ruser, a World of Warcraft addict who used the iSuite as a gaming nexus, and who so neglected his well-being that he eventually died of malnutrition.

Really odd question…

Can anyone think of the last time they read a really good car chase scene?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Why is it always the goddamn fan?

The fan on my laptop is dying. I can hear the bearing whirring. It's loud, and getting louder. Apparently, this is really common in Thinkpad T60s, because the fan is on all the time to deal with the overpowered GPU.

It looks like replacing the fan is trivial, although there's a non-trivial "use exactly 0.2 grams of thermal grease type XYZBBQWTF" instruction in there which warns of dire circumstances if I fail to heed the warning.

Sigh. Maybe I'll just take it to Seattle Laptop. They'll charge me an arm and a leg and possibly an ear, but for some reason I'm just not inspired to crack open a used laptop that's less than a year old. Unfortunately, it was a refurb when I bought it, so it's warranty expired back in July.