Patricia Hearst, I Love You

The weekend's plans were more or less as follows: Saturday afternoon we drop the boys off at Nicole's parents, we come home, maybe sneak in a Buffy episode before supper, then head off to the Cult of Pain meeting in the north end. Sunday morning I get to sleep in while Nicole gets up, goes to Beaumont to get the kids, and goes to church with her family.

Instead, Nicole and the boys began to get sore throats and runny noses Friday evening. By Saturday afternoon, the boys were too sick for the grandparents to risk babysitting them, and no other babysitter could be found on short notice. So instead I stayed home with the boys while Nicole risked her health and went off to the writers' group meeting with one of the other Millwoods members. We watched the first two-thirds of "Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets"(on Luke's request, surprisingly, since the last the time we watched it he didn't sit through the whole thing), then the kids had some medicine and went to bed. I watched a Friends episode on DVD and tried, unsuccessfully, to burn a CD on one of those wretched Fujifilm discs.

Simon's feeling not too bad, and has been able to go to school, but Nicole and Luke are still sick. I'm still okay, and if I'm lucky I'll miss out on getting sick like I did the last time everyone else did. On the other hand, the memory of that sweet Christmas-holiday time off is still fresh... That's the perk of being sick, of course, getting to stay home. But the being sick part doesn't always feel like it makes up for it.

Don't Touch The Flame

There's two futuristic ideas I've had recently. First, I was reading something about being able to transplant tooth cells to the back of a rat and having teeth grow there. (I seem to recall that stem cells were involved in some way, but I could be wrong.) It makes me think of one episode of Threshold where they had teeth growing inside vegetables. And then I thought--ivory. Right now to get ivory you have to kill an elephant and that's a bad thing. But I'm foreseeing that sometime in the next few decades you'll be able to harvest elephant cells and grow ivory in the factory, as much as you want. Whether it would need some kind of actual animal to grow on(rats with elephant tusks?), or if they could just have some amorphous heap of animal tissue that you feed the appropriate ingredients, or maybe some kind of tree, I don't know.

Second, as Simon was playing with his LeapPad, we got to talking about how it sounded when you got it to read individual words, because it was just playing a recording of someone saying that word on its own, in no context, with no intonation like you would get in an actual sentence. That made me think about computer voice synthesis, which I'm sure has improved from the "Stephen Hawking voice" over the last decade or so, and I immediately wondered if the next step in computer-animated movies would be to have all the voices computer-generated, too. Which leads naturally to wondering how long it will be before one can make a complete movie in photorealistic detail that is completely computer-generated, sound and pictures. What will happen to the movie industry, or TV? It'll be like reality TV all over again--loads of crap will be dumped by anyone with a laptop who can put together a script and generate a few Sims. Actually, it'll be the opposite of reality TV, because "unscripted" won't really be an option, at least until we get AI into the picture, which is beyond the scope of this speculation. Flesh-and-blood actors will hang around for a while, and may not disappear completely, but you'd also get pretty people who couldn't act who would just license their likenesses and body forms for use. If you didn't want to shell out for them, you'd have to use something generic that didn't infringe on anyone who was licensed.

There's probably loads of stories in there, or at least interesting tidbits to stick into the backdrop, but I'm not likely to use them, so I thought I'd put them out there free of charge. 'Cuz copyrighting/patenting ideas is wrong.

A Tree-Free Parenthesis

I've finished reading Midnight Tides, the fifth book in Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of The Fallen" series. Except that it's not really the fifth book in the series, the way The Fires of Heaven is the fifth book in the "Wheel of Time" series.

It's an odd series, really. The first book, Gardens of The Moon, has two sequels--the second book, Deadhouse Gates, follows one set of characters that journey to a different continent, as well as introducing a whole bunch of new ones, and the third book, Memories of ice, which stays on the same continent and follows most of the same characters but still introduces a few more. The fourth book, House of Chains, is back with the second book's characters, but it starts with extensive backstory on one of them.

So far, so good, though I'd also have to point out that it's hard to find an overarching plot for the first four books. But the fifth book wanders off entirely. It takes place earlier in the timeline, for one thing--though the date is only mentioned once in a way that is comparable with the other books--and it's in a completely different part of the world. It also doesn't include many characters from the other books--in fact, there's only two whose names seem vaguely familiar, and I need to check the Dramatis Personae from the other books to see if they do show up there.

It's also a little bit different in style. The first book reminded me most strongly of Glen Cook's Black Company books, though without Croaker's first-person POV, in that it focuses mostly on milirary characters, and some of that carries on through the other books. But Midnight Tides has a strong Terry Pratchett flavour to it, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but it also contains scenes that verge on the horrific. In some ways it's the story of two sets of brothers--the three Beddict brothers from the human Letherii Kingdom, and the Sengar brothers from the Tiste Edur tribes that the Letherii are trying to expand into--but there's plenty of other characters, too, and a fair sampling of the elder races that sometimes threaten to overwhelm the mere human characters in the series as a whole. (One of the more godlike characters says something to the effect that humans are a dead end, and there are also pointed critiques of capitalism, the dominant philosophy of the Letherii, throughout the book.)

Of the three Beddict brothers, Hull is a former scout whose investigations of neighbouring tribes brought about, to his horror, their conquest by the Letherii, and who is trying to stop the same happening to the Tiste Edur. Tehol, who lives in squalor and sleeps on the roof of his building, is a financial genius with a manservant named Bugg, and is at the heart of the book's funniest scenes. Brys, the youngest brother, is a gifted swordsman and the king's bodyguard. With the Sengar brothers, Trull is our major viewpoint character, unsure about the newly-united tribes and their Warlock King, whose loyalty is tested to the breaking point. We also see Fear Sengar(note--his name doesn't seem to mean "fear", it's just Fear. Yes, it bugs me too), whose stronger loyalty is often contrasted with his brother's, and the young Rhulad, an unblooded warrior whose eagerness to prove himself has profoundly disastrous consequences. We don't see as much of Binadas, blood-brother to Hull Beddict and a powerful mage.

In some ways I think this is a better introduction to the series than Gardens of The Moon, which starts in medias res and almost throws too much at you at once. Midnight Tides does, admittedly, not lead directly into the rest of the series, but it introduces the plethora of elder races a little more slowly, and also spares the time to explain some confusing concepts that are taken for granted in the other books, such as "warrens". (A warren is the source of a mage's power, and also, often, an actual external dimension, sometimes with inhabitants, and the two uses are often confusing; here, they are explained fairly clearly.) So if you're considering trying the series out, this might be the way to go. As long as you understand that the rest of the books aren't as funny.