Ooh, skiffy!

Books I’ve been reading lately:

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. An absolute delight; a masterpiece of satire and black humor.

Player Piano, also by Vonnegut; his first novel, in fact. Far less enjoyable; he had not yet found his form. Pretty much the only element it has in common with his later work is its pessimism.

Archform: Beauty, by L. E. Modesitt, was very interesting because it is the only Modesitt novel I’ve read (and I’ve read most of what he’s written up until around 2000) where the main protagonist’s actions results in neither the collapse of the antagonist’s civilization nor the total obliteration of their real estate. Instead, the male protagonists buys the female protagonist flowers and asks her out. Far out.

Lilith: A Snake in the Grass, the first book in Jack L. Chalker‘s Four Lords of the Diamond series. I know it’s not nice to speak poorly of the deceased, but Chalker, a fairly well-respected SF author, managed to get pretty much all of the science wrong in this one. Continue reading “Ooh, skiffy!”

One step forward, two steps back

I play a fair number of games. I go through about one PS2 game a month, on average, plus various PC games once in a while—mostly platformers and first or third person shooters on the PS2, and strategy / adventure on the PC, with some puzzle gmaes like Oasis thrown in.

The one thing that never ceases to surprise me with these games—especially console games—is how most of them share the same two elementary flaws, which you’d think they’d discovered and fixed years ago. Continue reading “One step forward, two steps back”

This is your brain on… what?

According to this Seattle PI article (which is unsurprisingly full of factual errors) music producers are up in arms over lossy audio compression. Listening to an MP3 (regardless of bit rate, apparently) is “like hearing through a screen door” and even CDs “contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording” (no mention is made of the fact that the half that is removed is below your stereo equipment’s noise threshold). But what really pisses me off is that these are the same producers who keep reducing the dynamic range of their recordings to make them sound louder. Some modern pop / rock recordings have a dynamic range as low as 4 dB!