I've heard about Dilbert as this corporate satire comic that is very funny. I've avoided it as much as possible, probably because I was afraid it would make fun of my way of life and find it makes valid points. Today, I succumbed to my curiosity and clicked a YouTube Dilbert video.
Apparently it is the week of eulogies on my blog. Neil Armstrong died on August the 25th. You may remember him: he was the guy that first stepped on the Moon. I didn't know the guy, other people say he was inspiring, a great person and other things like that. A good emotional blog post you can read at the Bad Astronomy site.
But I think that his death, at 82 years of age, is less relevant than the fact we stopped going to the Moon. From the dirty dozen that walked on a space body other than Earth, only 8 remain alive and they are, without exception, born in the early 1930s, so all around 80 years old. Depending on many factors that usually cancel out, these people have around a decade of life left in them, so expect that in 10 years or less we will have no man on Earth that went anywhere else. The death of the last man to have walked on the Moon would be even sadder than Neil's.
That's not only romantically ugly, emotionally wrong, it is plain stupid. It's like we close our senses, humanity as a whole, to the options we have, to the alternatives laid out right in front of us. We act like those retarded tourists that go to an exotic location only once in their life and they return with "Meh! No one spoke English, I didn't have the guts to try the food and the service was crap". Forget the accounting bottom lines and the terribilistic "We gotta stop putting our eggs in a single basket", just think that in a few years we, as the human race, we'll have forgotten what it is like to step on the Moon, the experience gone from our collective memory. We will just sit there, on the bloody couch, counting our money and looking at the picture of the imprint of Neil Amstrong's foot, a simple postcard to replace memories lost.
Yes! Another good sci-fi book. Blindsight is a hard science fiction standalone novel in which, using the idea of contact with an impossibly alien species as a pretext, Peter Watts discusses hard subjects like the future of humanity and its very definition, the nature of conciousness and the difference between intelligence and self awareness. It also features vampires (ugh!), but with a good scientific background and true relation to the plot.
There is no romance in this bleak and autopsic book, where the essence of all the characters gets dissected to complete the tableau of the human race under cold fluorescent lighting. Good stuff! But one gets to expect this from Canadian writers, eh? :)
The other cool reason why you should read the book is that it is free at Watts' site: Blindsight. Enjoy!
Of course that when an international celebrity, a man who touched the lives of many, a loved friend and movie person dies, I make it all about me. But you see, I can't not feel guilty, as I believe I am at to blame for Tony Scott's death.
I have long known that I am part of the long tail, that part of humanity that is forever ignored and shunned as a bunch of individually strange mutants with odd tastes that can't appreciate the world and can't be appreciated by the majority of other homo sapiens (or even each other). But it goes much farther and creepier than this.
When I like a restaurant or bar, it closes down immediately. If I think a particular location is quaint and pleasant it is immediately assaulted and raped by supermarket and hotel chains. If I enjoy using a line of bus or tramway, it gets redirected or work starts on it and never ends. If I like a movie, it never gets sequels (or prequels or parallel stories or spin-offs or any kind of remake). If I like a TV series, it promptly gets cancelled, sometimes in mid season even when the rest of the episodes have already been filmed and montaged. And, of course, if I like an actor or a director, they die. It is a fact of life. I liked Tony Scott, I enjoyed his creations, so he had to die.
Funny thing is, I've enjoyed Scott's movie creations without caring that he did the work, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder, The Last Boyscout, Enemy of the State, to name a few. I only noticed him in TV series, having worked together with his brother Ridley on some of the best shows there are out there. Even if the plot was about the usual stuff, like police procedure or lawyers or whatever, the shows always had that human dimension that made you feel like you are watching real people living their life. Numb3rs and The Good Wife enter this category. And I said "Tony and Ridley Scott make the best TV shows!". That was my mistake and now Tony is dead.
"Why Tony?", you may ask. There is an answer to this, too. I really, really, really hated what Ridley Scott did to Prometheus, thus ensuring a healthy and long lived franchise and dooming poor Tony.
Now, about Tony Scott and the feelings that his work and his death evoked to normal people, even if I knew anything about it, I couldn't write it better than the guys at The Horror Club. Sorry M'Hael, it was me!
The Legacy of Heorot is a good sci-fi book, part of yet another trilogy: Heorot, written by no less than three authors: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. You've heard of Niven by way of Ringworld, the others are no first time writers either, but I have frankly never heard of them.
The book is about a colony of people on the fourth planet of Tau Ceti. They call it Avalon and the colony Camelot, declaring their ideal of an honest equalist society that has the good of the people at heart. But of course, as the title of the series suggests, the plot moves towards the story of Beowulf rather than any round table. In face of doom and disaster, people tend to go through standard phases, starting with denial, while any façade of equality and reason quickly crumbles.
And this above paragraph pretty much details the subject of the book as well as the reason why I was partly disappointed with it. I was afraid that the story would be yet another actualization of the myth of Beowulf, which would have bored me to hell, but it wasn't. Yet it wasn't really a strong psychological or social commentary either. More of an optimistic view of the first human interstellar colony. Like any government or corporation would spend a whole lot of money on a space ship, in order to send it to another planet and then made it a present to the crew of the ship, fire and forget like. (See how I start and finish sentences with "like", I'm pretty rad, huh?) And all the people there, selected by a well designed process, would be nice and intelligent and having no social pathology at all.
But the book is nice enough, regardless of my bleak and neurotic projections. It focuses on the planet's (very simple) ecology and the way the colonists interact with each other and fight for their prize. They have colonized a small island in order to minimize threats, but there is a huge unexplored continent waiting for them, therefore the trilogy. It was nice, though, that the first book is rather standalone. If you choose to read it and you do not want to continue the series, there is no hook at the end, it just satisfactorily finishes all that was started.
I was searching for horror books and I tried this list from a book site. Little did I know that the asshole that wrote the list had a vampire fetish and so he listed all the books with vampires that he ever read.
Blood and Magic, by Lena Austin, is not a horror book, it's an adult fantasy book where sexy vampire bitches have sex with magical and well endowed unicorns. That should say enough about the book, and yet I have read it. It was easy to read, being a short single threaded narrative that had the only purpose of getting the main character (said red headed vampire girl) well fucked, respected and pretty much anything she wanted. I am sure sometime in the future will be discovering that she is also a princess of sorts.
I've just returned from a holiday spent in the lovely Bulgarian town called Obzor. At least other people say it's lovely, I thought it was full of them (people, I mean) which would explain both their assessment and mine. Anyway, my wife and I stayed at this hotel called The Cliff and spent 8 days together celebrating her birthday and 10 years of marriage. Happy birthday, love! These are my impressions of the journey.
First we had to get there and there are two major routes from Bucharest to Obzor: through Ruse and across Bulgaria and through Durankulak, after driving on the newly constructed A2 highway in Romania (the digit two coming from the fact that we only have two highways at the moment and this is the second). We went via Ruse and returned on the highway, with similar time results and positive feelings. The GPS did it again and chose a more scenic route running through small villages like, for example, Sindel. I shouted "Fatality!" when we exited the village, to my wife's dismay. Even so, it was a good quality road, which in Romania you rarely see in small rural areas and we enjoyed the wilderness.
Ok, we got there. The Cliff hotel is located just outside Obzor and is a four star hotel. That means... at the moment I have no idea what it means, I just assumed it would be way better than a three star hotel, but it appears it is about the same, only with a pool and a lot more expensive. Actually, I want to spend some time discussing The Cliff. It is one of those hotels that have so much potential and yet the experience is being spoiled by little details which I suspect are the fault of greedy little owners not understanding that they are serving people, that's their job, not just owning stuff and getting richer.
Getting back. A few hundred meters below The Cliff there is the yooBulgaria resort. One could probably go over the Net, find this hotel and choose it, just like we did with The Cliff, to spend their holidays. We went there. It looked nice, but the entire hotel was surrounded by abandoned buildings, victims of the economic crisis in times of great investment in the tourism business in Bulgaria. Seriously, it looked like the hotel was the lucky building that survived a full aerial bombardment of the entire zone. I am talking about empty concrete scaffolds with graffiti on them. Horror movies and parkour videos could be made there.
The town of Obzor was actually a village till 1984. Then it was promoted and then the Communist era ended and the tourism took hold. As a result it is a combination of greedy tourist corporations, small family owned businesses and a tourism oriented management.
We searched the Internet on the best restaurants there and we found: "Starata Kushta", recommended by three different sites that had the same text in them. We couldn't find this restaurant and so we went to recommendation number two: the Tania restaurant. It is a nice little thing, but rather expensive. The guy recommended the pizza there; he probably never went to Romania. Their pizza is mediocre at best. Try the fish things, but do not, under any circumstances, ask for sauces. They are horrible. Then we tried our luck with what was there (and this is my recommendation for anyone visiting Obzor: try your luck, eventually you will find something you will like) and found Morska Perla, or the Sea Pearl. There was this deliciously looking waitress there. We were, of course, served by the old ugly one that didn't know English. The fish was OK, the prices reasonable, but they had this apricot brandy that was really something. We also tried Dionisi, right next to Tania. The pizza in Tania was about 14 leva and rather small. The one at Dionisi was the same size and 4.5 leva. Unfortunately you paid for what you got: pizza from supermarket dough and some cheap stuff sprinkled over. The spaghetti were floating in oil.
The last restaurant I want to mention was almost great: it's called Rai (Heaven) and it is also located around Tania, about 500 meters from it. They have this Rai Calamari dish that has 500 grams and costs 27 leva. I thought it sounded OK, but I really expected some piece of fried cephalopod and instead got a squid filled with a mix of onions, oyster and small shrimp and served with four jumbo shrimps. So, even if the menu didn't advertise it (bad for them) the dish was actually a seafood plateau, something I had been searching for unsuccessfully in Obzor and went up to Balchik to have at Regina Maria (did I mention the hotel and the restaurant are great? They have sushi!)
The only problem with Obzor restaurants and bars is that they don't have dark beer. None of them! I also asked for lemonade and none of them had any! It's water with lemon and something sweet, for crying out loud... I drank a lot of Grozdova Rakia (grape brandy), a Bulgarian speciality, and Kamenitsa, their beer.
That's about it. We visited close by Nesebar, which is nice, but filled with tourists. There was a cool restaurant there, called Hemingway. Not in any way connected to the writer, but good food. We never got to Burgas and we only passed through Varna a few times. Bottom line: Obzor is a nice see side town, but I wouldn't want to be housed in that cacophony of noises, music and smells. The Cliff was a good option, remote as it was, although the sounds from Obzor occasionally made their way there, as well, but it had its flaws.
I am a .NET programmer living and working in Bucharest, Romania.
Posts are divided into programming and misc.
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Yes! Another good sci-fi book. Blindsight is a hard science fiction standalone novel in which, using the idea of contact with an impossibly alien species as a pretext, Peter Watts discusses hard subjects like the future of humanity and its very definition, the nature of conciousness and the difference between intelligence and self awareness. It also features vampires (ugh!), but with a good scientific background and true relation to the plot.
The Legacy of Heorot is a good sci-fi book, part of yet another trilogy: Heorot, written by no less than three authors: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. You've heard of Niven by way of Ringworld, the others are no first time writers either, but I have frankly never heard of them.
I was searching for horror books and I tried this list from a book site. Little did I know that the asshole that wrote the list had a vampire fetish and so he listed all the books with vampires that he ever read.
