1984 was a good year

This will be quick because I have home­work to do. Over the week­end I read Neu­ro­mancer. It’s the clas­sic cyber­punk novel by William Gib­son, pub­lished in 1984. The book has been on my read­ing list for years. Boot­camp got me think­ing about read­ing it again. I was kick­ing around Mer­cer St Books this week­end with a friend, with no inten­tion of buy­ing any­thing because my books are over­flow­ing their shelves. The place has a pre-internet feel, with a good stock, poorly orga­nized and rea­son­ably priced. I eat it up. As I was leav­ing, I saw Neu­ro­mancer sit­ting on the top of a stack of ran­dom books. “Okay, fine,” I thought to an ill-defined energy, and bought it. I rarely putting it down over the next two days. The gen­der thing was fucked, as I have unfor­tu­nately come to expect with every­thing in the sci-fi gen­era. That said, the aching self-destructiveness of all the major char­ac­ters laced through the plot with enough con­sis­tency that I sym­pa­thized with the des­ti­tute. The char­ac­ters that arose in the end and clar­i­fi­ca­tion about what was hap­pen­ing, seemed banal, despite the dra­matic and twisted char­ac­ter, in com­par­i­son to the slow build of emo­tional cred­i­bil­ity of Case, the main char­ac­ter, and a few oth­ers. The drama of the task that they are faced with and the conun­drum of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gences call­ing the shots is a back­drop for how var­i­ous char­ac­ters man­age their drive for skills and their self-destructiveness. The nuances around this con­flict in a tech­no­log­i­cal era where “beauty is cheap” and any­thing, every sort of dream, is traded on the black mar­ket raises some clas­sic themes of sci­ence fic­tion. I do pre­fer this cyber­punk stuff to the far off sci-fi of Asi­mov and the like. It makes me nos­tal­gic for the base­ment of Time’s Up!

I’ve got plenty of pics of the base­ment, just too lazy to dig them up.
I should go down there soon, get my hands greasy!

Another thing that hap­pened the year of my birth was the first Apple com­puter. I was reminded of that on Tues­day watch­ing Revenge of the Nerds, the PBS doc­u­men­tary that aired in the mid 1990’s about the rise of the per­sonal com­puter. It really is a good Apple commercial…

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=z9PQ16KVntQ]

The youn­gins might know it bet­ter from the recent res­ur­rec­tion as an anti-Hilary spoof.

School is going well. Obvi­ously I’m hav­ing fun for­get­ting I’m not a teenager any­more. Okay, I’m gonna get some home­work done and then go scare myself sleep­less with a lit­tle H. P. Lovecraft.