Typically I’m not into fiction novels. Any science involved doesn’t really work (although movies and TV are more likely to do this), the characters often don’t feel real or deep, and it just doesn’t provide an interesting ride. But a clear exception to this is the work of H.P. Lovecraft, a clear master of horror. For those of you who are into fiction and haven’t heard of him, go read him now. Through the magic of the Internet, I can wait. He simply is that good. Or put another way,
H.P. Lovecraft built the stage on which most of the last century’s horror fiction was performed. As doomed as any of his protagonists, he put a worldview into words that has spread to infect the world. You need to read him – he’s where the darkness starts. – Neil Gaiman
As part of the seminar I’m in on Large Scale Data Analysis, I gave a talk on the continuing battle in the MapReduce world between DeWitt and Stonebraker on the side of parallel databases versus Dean and Ghemawat on the side of MapReduce. For those of you not interested in reading these long articles, it basically boils down to this: DeWitt and Stonebraker originally claimed that MapReduce allowed for fast data movement but was slow for actual computation, so you should use parallel databases instead (they suggested Vertica and “DBMS-X”, a mystery database).
I have heard very often that the critical event of the 20th century was World War I, and to find out the consequences of that, I read Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. And while that does an excellent job of describing the aftermath of World War I, I found myself wanting more with respect to how the Russian tsars fell. So when I saw Rasputin’s face staring me down at the local Borders, I knew I had to pick it up and see what was really going on and the role the enigmatic Rasputin played in it.
A while ago I did a screencast on the basic features of AppScale, but the quality was just not what I was looking for. So when the opportunity to do a new screencast came up, I bought ScreenFlow (which I should have done from the start) and with it, slapped together a way better screencast! Enjoy!
After reading the incredibly long books The Foundation and Atlas Shrugged, I figured that this time I’d go with something a bit shorter. So with that in mind, I picked up an old classic that I read back in school a long time ago: Fahrenheit 451. And while it’s not as deep or moving as the previous two books, it is still well worth the price of admission and has a lot of valuable things to say.
Ever since I saw Jennifer Burns’ interview on The Daily Show, I knew I had to read Ayn Rand’s books and see what all the rage was about. In a nutshell, she was on promoting her new book and how Republicans in the United States are embracing the works of Ayn Rand and the potential pitfalls involved. At a very superficial level, the idea is that Republicans tend to be elitist and traditionally want a small government, which is more or less what Ayn Rand is proposing. But at the end of the day, Ayn Rand is a Libertarian, and Republicans and Libertarians just don’t mix. There are, however, a slew of other reasons why Ayn Rand is not a good fit for the Republican party. But in order to talk about why Ayn Rand is not a good fit for Republicans, we must first talk about Ayn Rand.
So I just finished The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and had quite a bit to say about it, but here’s the thing. There’s really so much going on in it that I will definitely need a full blog post or two to really get it all out there, and since I’ll be reading Atlas Shrugged soon anyways, I figured I can combine the two into a super-long essay that you and Google will enjoy even more. That, and the fact that the interview that turned me onto these books in the first place pretty much said everything I feel like saying in this lazy state:
This blog attempts to catalog my experiences, and as such focuses on books I’ve read and software I’ve written (albeit heavily biased towards the former). As such, I feel this is a perfect time to talk about why I came across the particular name of this blog that I did, “Byzantine Reality”. Of course, if you’ve read the “About Me” page, you’ll know that Byzantine refers to software of a certain quality and not the empire of the same name. So let’s dive a little deeper and talk about what we really mean when I say we live in a Byzantine Reality.
Previously we discussed a critical storytelling element: the power of characterisation. It seems to me as though books are the best medium for character development, and there seems to be something about the medium that really makes it stand out here. Fundamentally, it’s tied to how long the reader is engaged with the material. The typical moviegoer’s attention is fixed for two to three hours on average, while someone reading a book tends to focus their attention for much longer. Thus with the extra time, books can really develop their characters in a superior fashion. By the same logic, a television series also has great potential to develop and strengthen its characters over time, since the TV series also has ample time to engage its viewer. But while characterisation is an important storytelling element, I feel like we beat that point into the ground last time. This time, I want to talk about a different key storytelling element: immersion.
It’s probably fair to say that I watch a good amount of television and movies. I also read quite a bit of books and play a lot of video games. So with that under my belt I think it’s reasonable to say that I have to see characters developed and realized somewhat often. And yet it’s only now, after reading Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, can I really say I “get” characterization and the underlying paradox involving making a character really stand out. With that, come along on our adventure of “how to develop characters and how not to” that will take us from Jane Austen to the world of Heroes and with a little stop-off in the Warhammer 40000 universe.
