Reading Challenge #75: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

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It’s been a while since my previous reading challenge post. There’s two reasons for that. First, there were a bunch of great books that came out in the past couple months that I couldn’t wait to read. Seriously, if you might be interested in the Cthulhu mythos told from the perspective of a Deep One, check out Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy series. Or if ghost stories from the perspective of a ghost are more your speed, try the Ghost Roads books by Seanan McGuire.

Anyway the second reason it’s been a while between these reading challenge reviews is that this next book is another by Neal Stephenson. You may remember that my reading ground to a halt during the previous book of his that was on the list. I was so dreading going through that again that I kept putting it off. The book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, first published in 1995.

So, was my fear validated? Read on to find out!

This story mainly follows Nell, a young girl from a poor background with no particular class standing, who happened to get caught up in someone else’s social experiment. That experiment is in the form of a very special book. Commissioned by a neo-victorian lord, Lord Finkle-McGraw, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is a piece of bespoke nanotech engineering. It’s purpose is to help a young girl lead an “interesting” life, teaching her to be subversive, but not so subversive that she wouldn’t eventually become a functioning member of society.

The Primer was created by an engineer named Hackworth, who made an illicit copy with the intent of giving it to his daughter. Unfortunately it was stolen by Nell’s brother, who brought it home as a gift for her with no idea what it actually was. The Primer uses narrative to teach Nell, adapting to her needs and her surroundings to provide what it thinks will benefit her at the time.

In parallel with Nell, the story also continues to follow Hackworth. After losing the Primer he gets blackmailed by the mysterious “Dr. X” into sharing the plans for it with him and eventually working for him on an undisclosed project. Dr. X needs to be able to mass produce the Primer because he is overseeing the care of thousands of Chinese girls who had been abandoned to the elements as infants. Like Finkle-McGraw, Dr. X is also trying to use the Primer to engineer a better society, just one with a very different cultural pedigree and values.

X and Finkle-McGraw are working at odds with each other on another project though: the development of “seed” technology. This is a next step beyond the “feed” technology that drives material production in the novel. Instead of getting matter and energy via a feed line, the seed tech would let anyone grow anything they need from a “seed”. Dr. X sees it as necessary for his people to be able to thrive without reliance on the western-based tech of the feed. The neo-victorians fear it because it means anyone could make anything they can engineer, including weapons.

Much like the previous Stephenson novel I read for this list (Anathem), this one has many sections where the plot slows to a crawl while we explore some interesting angle of philosophy or technology. Unlike Anathem, The Diamond Age does at least have a plot that isn’t completely crammed into the final quarter of the book. Both of these books have incredibly intriguing ideas at their core, and both fall flat to me because the story felt like a thin wrapper for the idea rather than something of value in its own right. I find this especially interesting coming on the heels of Rendezvous with Rama which seems to have similar failings, but which I wholeheartedly love. Maybe it’s because Rama is an extension of one simple idea rather than a whole textbook chapter, or because Rama story moves along at a reasonable pace and it’s just the characters that are lacking. It might also be that Rama is half the length of Diamond Age. I don’t mind long books when I’m engaged in the story, but that definitely didn’t happen here.

The Diamond Age ends rather abruptly just as Nell disrupts a ceremony/computation that is likely to result in the seed blueprints. On the one hand I do like that it is left a bit ambiguous. We don’t know if the seed will eventually get made anyway (it seems likely) or how the world might change in its wake. On the other hand the story also stops just short of a moment of emotional payoff, of Nell getting to meet the woman who is essentially her mother (who raised her through her work acting out stories for the Primer). There’s a whole theme throughout the book about how Nell is different from other girls with Primers precisely because she has this mother figure, but we miss out completely on any resolution of this thread. For me this just underlines how the thought experiment of societal structure and technology took precedence over the narrative about actual people, and overall left me with a bad taste.

TL;DR: The story of an experiment in trying to improve society by educating subversive young women. Stephenson is great at being thought provoking, but less great at compelling storytelling.

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

Rating: 3/5 stars

Next up: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi

On Gundam Breaker

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I was quite excited for New Gundam Breaker when it was announced to be releasing here in the States, but it turns out that game’s quite awful. This was quite disappointing because Gundam Breaker 3 was pretty amazing, so I’d like to talk about that game instead.

On Gundam Breaker
Taking a bit of a step back, the Gundam series has been putting animated giant robots on TV for almost 40 years. Models of said robots, generally known as Gunpla, have been around for almost as long. Gundam Breaker is a game series that is entirely about building and battling Gunpla. Gundam Breaker 3 is the first game in the series to be translated into English, although it was only released in Asia. The general premise is the typical for a tournament anime: you fight battles, you crush all comers, you sometimes get sidetracked by odd sidequests, and you win everything. Gameplay involves you and potentially a few AI-controlled teammates battling swarms of other gunpla in order to progress through a linear stage. This is occasionally broken up by objectives or stronger enemies in the form of “other players”. Most stages end with a boss or two, which can be anything from just a stronger enemy, a giant enemy, or a large “Mobile Armor”.

On Gundam Breaker
Along the way, as you beat enemies you may break parts off of them. This has a chance to cause the parts to drop, as well as a chance when you defeat an enemy. When you finish a mission, you have an opportunity to review what you got and potentially incorporate anything you find into your own gunpla. Your skills level up, you can combine parts to make your parts level up, and there’s a lot of depth to the whole “building” system. Some parts have built-in skills which you can only use when the part is set. Mastering these skills will let you use them even without an appropriate part equipped. Also attached to parts are Option Equipment, which are additional weapons/attacks enabled just by having certain parts set. A pair of legs with a sword strapped on will let you swing the sword, for example.

On Gundam Breaker
It’s this building and customizing that really got me hooked on the game. It’s so much fun just seeing what you can make and getting to then turn around and use it in the next mission. It’s still pretty easy to get this one with all of the DLC, so I highly suggest you give it a try if you’re into Gundams in any way.

Blaugust: Get to know each other!

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Blaugust: Get to know each other!Belghast has kicked off this week of Blaugust by reminding us that it is “get to know each other week” and sharing a bit about himself and his childhood. I don’t usually share a lot of personal information about myself here because I prefer to focus on the gaming. Today I’ll make an exception so I can join in the Blaugust fun and games.

I talked a bit already about my earliest introduction to games with my uncle’s Atari. I never had a console of my own until much later, when I saved up my allowance and got a Nintendo (NES). In between, however, we had something that fundamentally set me up for both my favorite hobby and my eventual career. It was a well-loved, hand-me-down Commodore 64.

I don’t really know how my parents got interested enough to obtain it. I certainly didn’t have anything to do with that. My mom did a lot of typing for newsletters and things. She had a nice typewriter and eventually a word processor, so maybe she wanted the computer so she could use it for writing. Or maybe my dad just wanted it to mess around and see what all the fuss was about. It is my dad that I remember using it the most. He taught himself BASIC so he could program a simple hockey game on it.

That silly little game was a revelation to me. I played lots of games on that old C64, either shareware passed along by my many cousins, or ones bought from the clearance bin from the computer store in the mall. Seeing my dad make his own game made me realize that was something people could do. Games didn’t just appear fully formed on a floppy disk; somebody made them up and wrote all the code that made them work.

I learned how to program from my dad and by copying code from computer magazines. I never made anything very complicated, but the process opened up a path for me that I’ve followed the rest of my life. Today I leave making games to somebody else, but I do still use my coding skills. I’m lucky enough to get to do science using a ridiculously powerful supercomputer for a living, all thanks to that humble C64 and a dad who unknowingly helped me get started on my true path.

Dealing with Absences

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Dealing with Absences

Yesterday was crazy.  It was one of those days when moments after checking my phone I realized things had gone south with the patch cycle from the night before.  I tried remoting into things from home and had no luck, so I hurriedly shower, dressed and drove into work to see if I could raise anyone to get the matter resolved.  I left so rapidly that I freaked my poor wife out who was out on a walk…  and she came home to my vehicle being missing from the drive way.  The other bad thing is that I didn’t actually get breakfast meaning I was probably more grumpy than intended during the entire day.  The problem with running on adrenaline is that there is an inevitable crash…  which came about noonish.  All of this said…  I didn’t get to do a morning blog post yesterday and I was not in the proper frame of mind when I got home to do one either.

As a result this morning I am going to use this incident as a teaching moment.  There will be times when you just cannot force a blog post out of yourself…  and that is okay.  When I was doing my “Grand Experiment” that involved posting every single day I managed to make it 1121 days without missing a post or a little over three years.  That streak sorta developed a life of its own as time went on, but I knew sooner or later I would need to break it for my own sanity.  Knowing that regardless of the day that you had to get up and write something was fairly oppressive.  I would literally day dream about stopping cold turkey, and then ultimately talk myself back down off that ledge.  Ultimately when the time came I made a compromise and switched the blog for the last couple of years over to week days only, that way I could have the weekends to myself to leisurely do whatever comes along.

The truth is…  I would have probably been a lot happier with my streak of posts if I had allowed myself to have the occasional day off.  The thing with posting is that you need to be doing it regularly to gain reader traction, which for me at least translated into forcing myself to post something regardless of circumstances every day.  The truth however is that you simply need not to allow yourself to fall completely off the wagon.  It is fine to take a few days off here or there but for me at least the most important aspect is to get back to posting as soon as you feel able to.  The early days of my blog were a tale of a flurry of posts with massive gaps in between…  some of them months long.  The longer I was away the harder it seemed to create a post worth the justification of how long I was gone.  It was as though I needed to come up with some epic reason why I just wasn’t feeling up to writing about myself or the games I was playing.

In my experience however you just need to post something…  anything…  to get yourself over the hump after an absence.   You could post about what you had for breakfast…  or in my case yesterday the lack thereof.  You talk about whatever stressers caused you to need to duck your head back into your shell and turtle for awhile.  You could write about something on the horizon that you are looking forward to, or about something that you just accomplished that you are still thinking about.  The point is just to write something to get yourself over that initial gap in content and back into the habit of regularly posting again.

One of the things that I like about my current schedule is I feel like it gives me the room for these gaps.  Is it an extended weekend that includes a few days of vacatrion?  Then I have the option of writing on those days or just saying screw it and taking the entire time off from the blog.  Is there a time when life has just become too much and I cannot fit proper writing in?  Then a gap in the middle of the week is honestly no worse than a gap at the end of it.  Basically the schedule that allows for absences and not holding myself to some nonsense like those 1121 posts in a row…  makes the blogging experience far more livable.

I think ultimately that is why I have shifted things around this year for Blaugust is that I realized over time I was trying to get people to sign up for something that was largely unrealistic.  After that first Blaugust I noticed that the majority of “winners” that managed to get in all 31 posts in a month…  also wound up taking a full month off as a result.  A not insignificant number of those blogs simply ceased to exist afterwards…  or maybe had a few false starts at getting back at posting without ever really returning.  Basically Blaugust and that schedule had killed blogs…  which was the exact opposite of what I was hoping would happen.  I kept shifting around the format until in 2016 I simply couldn’t handle taking anything else on that year…  as was apparently the case with all of the events in our community.  So now as Blaugust has returned…  my hope has been that the focus be on just posting more regularly and also participating in the community…  rather than trying to run some race.

Dealing with Absences

I am not entirely certain if this post will help anyone, but I thought it was worth talking about the mindset I now take towards dealing with absences.  I hope you are having an awesome day and I highly suggest getting out and checking some of the other blogs participating in Blaugust.  Here are some resources to help you get started…

There is still plenty of time left in the month to participate.  If you are interested check out some of these links.

Side note:  The images don’t mean much of anything but I played some Monster Hunter World on PC last night and am getting tired of just posting the Blaugust logo over and over on these.