The Resurrectionist

The Resurrectionist, by E.B. Hudspeth, is a false document. That is, a story claims to be a biography of fictional character. In this case, Dr. Spencer Black.

Dr. Black’s father was a famous resurrectionist, that is, grave robber. He and his sons would venture to fresh graves and dig up corpses for use in anatomy lessons and such.

With time, the young Spencer Black would engage on his own medical career in the late 1800s. At first he became famous for fixing anomalies and birth defects. But, soon, he started thinking that some of these abnormalities were latent genetical traits trying to come back to the surface. For example, the doctor believed that a person that was born without arms was made that way because their body was trying to grow wings.

He then tries to create fantastical creatures by grafting pieces of existing creatures together and shows them off in an entirely macbre travelling show.

While fiction, this book totally seems plausible as the late 1800s was the time when strange touring shows tested the public’s imagination and sense of propriety. The book even pays homage to the famous Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in mentioning that Dr. Black came across an obviously faked specimen of a monkey’s head grafted to a fish’s body, purported to be some kind of tropical mermaid.

Once the biography is done, the rest of the book is Dr. Black’s unpublished master work, The Codex Extinct Animalia, which is an anatomical guide to various taxonomies of legendary creatures with commentary, such as stating that the minotaur is a creature with the worst possible traits of two animals, with none of gifts that the full bodies of those animals would provide. It has a human body with the head of a bull. It does not have a human mind to use the human body, and it doesn’t have a bull’s body to make use of its ability to charge or its strength.

It’s an awesomely macabre story as told via biography. Quite often I found myself wanting to hit up Wikipedia and read more about Dr. Black.

http://quirkbooks.com/TheResurrectionist

My piece about Bitcoin

As some of you know, Bitcoins are the new cryptocurrency currently sweeping the planet.

People are touting this as the end of government-controlled currencies, and yes, it does seem like something that’s really cool, but is it the end of money as we know it? That we have no need for government-controlled currencies?

No, I don’t think it’s the end of the Euro, Dollar, Yen, or whatever. An example of this can be found on Mt. Gox, the main Bitcoin exchange site. They list several currency exchange rates. Currently, the US Dollar is worth around $125 per bitcoin.

Sounds great, right? Well, yes, but…

The Bitcoin isn’t like the US Dollar where you have two decimal places of currency, like $0.00.

The Bitcoin goes to eight decimal places, so it’s 0.00000000.

To make this explanation easy, let’s imagine that one bitcoin (1.00000000) is worth $100 USD. So then we can say with certainty that….

0.1 BTC is ten dollars
0.01 BTC is one dollar
0.001 BTC is ten cent
0.0001 is one cent

Anything beyond that is pretty hard to communicate in terms of USD.

Okay, so, now, I have 0.00369536 BTC.

In our example, that would be $0.37 cent.

Over the past few days, I’ve been working off and on on a few “get bitcoins here” sites, most of which give 0.00000020 or less.

Oddly, even Crowdflower has programs that pay in BTC, but not a whole lot, like above. And yes, most of the BTC I’ve earned came from a few things they offered. Now, what’s odd, is that Crowdflower also offers small assignments via Amazon’s Turk program, where some things might pay 1 to 8 cent or so per task.

That eight cent would be 0.0008 BTC. So compare that to the 37 cent I’ve earned so far, and you see that by using those programs is a humongous waste of time since the ability to get up to the top three rungs of BTC will take far longer than just earning regular money.

Crowdflower also gets to pay out far smaller amounts than if the payout was in a recognized currency, such as USD.

So then, how to get BTC?

Apparently you can mine for it using computer hardware, but of course, my computer is too old and slow to be able to mine, either solo or as a group mining effort. The “mining” is essentially making your computer crunch numbers in an effort to uncover and decode new blocks of BTC data.

There was an article on Boingboing a few days ago where a guy who joined a joint mining group wrote about it. He earned more money from ads attached to his blog post about mining than he did mining for the week after he wrote it.

Another way is to do work in exchange for BTC. But of course, the problem with that is you’re paid in BTC, not USD, and 99.9999999999% of companies only accept money in USD right now. And because of that, I can’t put gas in my car with BTC or buy groceries with it either.

I liken the Bitcoin as almost a real-world version of the Darknet Credits from Daemon and Freedom (books by Daniel Suarez), or even World of Warcraft Gold. They have their uses, but so far too few people use them. Of course, as I’ve read many times over, it’s still the early days and there’s still plenty of coins to mine.

Of course, who knows where BTC will go. The price jumps around so much. At one point, 1 BTC was worth $10, then it shot up to $240, and is now around $125.

Just looking at the exchanges and stuff on blockchain.info is enough to get anyone wanting to jump on the bandwagon.

The Casual Vacancy

 

The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s most looked-forward-to book, aside from books 2 through 7 of the Harry Potter series, and is her first book to have absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter, or that universe.

On page two, the incident that sparks the casual vacancy happens: A councilor of a small British town dies.

This sparks a gigantic grab for the now-vacated seat. One group wants someone who is “Pro-Fields” to get it, while another group wants someone that is against the Fields to get it.

Just what is the Fields and why should anyone care?

The Fields is the “rough part of town” where just about everyone is an addict of some type, or will most likely be one in the future. Barry, the late councilor was from the Fields and therefore a Pro-Fields kind of guy.

There’s a bit of political back and forth over which township the Fields actually belongs to. It was created by a town near Pagford, but was pretty much given to Pagford over the years.

The story bounces between the happenings of the adults and the happenings of the kids. As to which group is the main group, that’s up to the reader’s speculation. For me, it seems as though the kids are the main characters, though the amount of characterization found in the adults and the children is breathtakingly marvelous. You really feel for their plights. Well, most of their plights.

One thing I thought was a bit off was Barry’s family, the ones hit the hardest by his death are the characters that are mentioned the least. It’s as if no one cares what happens to them. They pop up here and there, but they aren’t even minor characters.

This is as far from Harry Potter as you can get. I’m sure that Rowling couldn’t wait until she could write something that wasn’t “magical” to show people that she could write as well as anyone else could. In my opinion, she suffers from Kingitis, that is, an inflammation of words. On one hand, wordiness makes the world more alive, but it also makes the reading a bit of a chore.

After reading this the first thought that came to mind was, I wonder what Harry, Hermione, and Ron were up to when they weren’t actively being written about. 

Tales of the Abyss

I don’t think I’ve done many video game reviews, but after spending nearly 60 hours playing this one over the past few weeks, I really want to, and also it’d help to get this site out of the dearth of material that’s been plaguing me over the past year. I only posted a handful of stuff last year? This year will be different.

Anyway, when I started playing Tales of the Abyss, I thought it felt very familiar. Turns out I had watched the first few episodes of the anime and had possibly played some of the original PS2 game.

They say that no one ever reads the same book, that when you read a book you compare the story to previous stories. So too with games. Once I was past the “this is familiar because of the anime” problem, it morphed into the “this is familiar because this is almost every game I have ever played” problem.

The story starts with Luke, a young noble who is forbidden from leaving his manor because he had been kidnapped when he was ten, seven years ago and lost his memory. A woman appears and attempts to kill his mentor, yet Luke interferes and somehow he and the interloper vanish only to be transplanted somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The two work together to get back home and along the way learn more about each other and their plights. Eventually they make it back and all’s good, or is it?

While a few things from nearly every RPG ever made pops up, there’s enough variety in the story and characters to make this a great way to spend nearly 60 hours.

The characters are all excellently written and acted. My favorite character was Jade Curtiss, a Malkuth soldier who always has something sarcastic to say or otherwise delivers the best comebacks.

Fighting in this game is reminiscent of Star Ocean and the other Tales games in that the player controls a character and the computer controls the other three in a massive free-for-all, though you can control the tactics of the other characters and direct them to use certain attacks.

The battles seem to be pretty easy. My entire party only died in battle once through the entire game. Battles play out by spamming the Attack button while having your other characters bust out with attacks, spells, and healing as needed.

One of the plots of the game concerns a clones and the original person, this was the story I was really concerned about. If everyone was born to fulfill some purpose, what about those that were created just because science said they could be and then discarded without a thought? As such, several of the clone characters have a drive and a will to survive, to be better than the original. A superiority complex. While others see themselves as inferior to the original.

In all, this was a fun game and I’d play it again. Once the game is finished, the player can use “Grade” – a numerical form of experience gained after battles (but different from normal experience) to use on different variables in a subsequent play through, such as keeping the old levels, the ability to gain more experience, keeping items, etc. I’ve not tried to play the game again with any of these yet, I mean, the game itself was 60 hours, do I really want to play it for another 60? One day.

Another thing I liked (and would love to see in future RPGs) is a journal feature. The main character suffered memory loss as a kid so he keeps a fastidious journal that’s updated extremely often. If you have no idea where to go, check out the journal, it’ll point you in the right direction.

2012 in review

Only 11, well, now twelve posts this year?

It’s been a busy year, let’s hope I can work more on this site in 2013.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Some Remarks

I recently read Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson, the guy who wrote Snow Crash and Reamde, both reviewed elsewhere in this website.

Some Remarks is, like William Gibson’s recent Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of short fiction and articles written for Wired and other publications.

One article is a crazy piece of writing. A one hundred page article for Wired about laying fiber optic cables from the UK to Japan and all the crazy international hurdles and boundaries and laws that had to be observed in order for this to be done.

While the fiber optic wires are probably a thing of the past, the amount of technological know-how to be able to put thousands of miles of cable into the ocean deep enough to not get damaged and into the ground and skirted around a country’s infrastructure, is amazing to behold. It must have cost Wired thousands of dollars for this article to be written.

The rest of the articles and short stories are awesome crazy stories about the kind of thing we all like Neal for already so if you’re Neal fan, you’ll dig it. If you’re not, check it out, it’s a great starting place, once you read this you can dive into his other books, which usually exceed a thousand pages.

The Last Policeman

There are many stories that feature a race against the clock. If the killer isn’t found by the stroke of midnight, he’ll never be caught, or he’ll strike again, or any other number of endings that result in the killer never being brought to justice.

In The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters, there’s a time limit. If the killer isn’t caught in six months, the world will end. Of course, the world will end anyway.

Scientists have discovered a gigantic meteor in space, several kilometers across that is on a collision course with Earth. There’s mass rioting, looting, panic, mayhem, and suicides, many suicides.

While some people quit work to go do the things they want to do with their last few months, others go on about their day-to-day existence.

One of the day-to-dayers is newly promoted detective Henry Palace. Palace is one of the last few cops who still shows up to work every day.

He’s tackling a case that everyone is telling him he’s crazy to even pursue. Everyone’s going to die in six months, so why take the time and effort to solve a murder? A murder that everyone else believes is just another suicide here in Hanger Town.

Winters expertly describes a world that just doesn’t care anymore. People kill themselves left and right, every crime is punishable by death, if only because the suspect will be locked up when the meteor crashes.

The first book in a trilogy, The Last Policeman drops hints about the future of this doomed world and its end. I can’t wait to see where this series goes.

Over the four days it took me to read this book, I never put it down. Whenever I had to go somewhere, TLP went with me. The last day I read it, I clocked over a hundred pages, most of it in a single hour.

http://quirkbooks.com/thelastpoliceman