Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?
Friday, March 19
Pixy Is Currently Reading...
Book 5 of Charlie Stross's The Merchant Princes. The initial adventure story has, at this point, devolved into a seven-sided war spanning
four universes which is just the way I like it.
Update: One problem with this series is that Stross appears to have let his political views colour the story, and his political views are asinine. If those aren't his actual views, he's still badly mismanaged that part of the story.
1
I'm through three of those, and sort of taking a break before picking up #4. I like Stross well enough (just got into him midway through last year) but there's something just a bit off-kilter about his storytelling, I find I can only take him in one-or-two-book doses.
Posted by: GreyDuck at Friday, March 19 2010 11:51 PM (7lMXI)
2
There is in some of his books, yes. The more hard-SF ones like Iron Sunrise and the lighter ones seem to be free of this, Merchant Princes has a touch of it, but Accelerando I found unreadable.
I've also got a new Glen Cook SF novel and a new Alastair Reynolds after that, so I think a nice quiet weekend is called for.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, March 20 2010 12:02 AM (PiXy!)
3
Book 6 recently appeared here, I'll get to it shortly, I think. IIRC, it would not be wrong to characterize Stross as socialist, economically speaking, is that what you thought was leaking?
Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, March 20 2010 08:26 PM (hphNU)
4
The basic economics seem reasonable to me (I'm no economist) - a big part of the plot is that the Merchant Princes are running a, what's the term, mercantilist economy, and Miriam is trying to introduce them to capitalism.
On the topic of political economy, particularly with regard to our own world-analogue (he slips in some facts to indicate that it's not precisely our world), he's talking nonsense. And since he appears to actually hold the views expressed by the plot in that respect... Yeah.
Bit of a shame, since he's a fine writer and (I've chatted with him briefly online) a genuinely nice guy. It's not enough to ruin the story, but it still detracts from it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 21 2010 12:02 AM (PiXy!)
5
IIRC, Stross is some sort of cognitively dissonant left-wing libertarian-anarchist, who's nominally in favor of the free market, but can't resist all sorts of altruistic rentseeking giveaways which necessitate governmental tyrannies, while always pining for pie in the Singularity, in a Marxist withering-away-of-the-state sense.
That, and he's got a simply monstrous case of revolutionary fetishism. It creeps into every one of his books I've read.
What are the facts which set his Earth Prime apart from the real world, Pixy? I didn't notice any in the first four volumes; I've not bothered reading the fifth one yet.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Sunday, March 21 2010 03:30 AM (jwKxK)
6
The Earth Prime-ness doesn't really pop up until the fifth book. I kind of get the impression he wasn't intending it to be that way, but then real world political events meandered away from his plot setup.
Posted by: Mark at Sunday, March 21 2010 05:30 AM (bBxKr)
7
I seem to recall there was something in book four, but can't remember exactly what it was.
But in book five - Chief Justice who?!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 21 2010 10:58 AM (PiXy!)
Idea popped into my head for a story set in the Mina Smith universe. Mina's a customs agent, but this time our protagonist is an accountant. As much an accountant as Mina is a customs agent, anyway.
Just a snippet that I'll likely never finish, but anyway... more...
It kind of reminds me of H. Beam Piper's Paratime Police stuff. Not bad at all.
You wrote this the same week you were trying to write your own SQL language? The Handicapper General's gonna come get you if you're not careful, Harrison.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Tuesday, February 16 2010 03:03 AM (jwKxK)
3
I haven't actually read any Piper in decades. I'm sure there's a germ of an idea or three borrowed from there, as well as the whirling SF cosmos in general. Mina Smith is the protagonist in the original (similarly fragmentary and unpublished) stories I've set in the same universe, but earlier in the timeline, and as I indicated, a customs agent tasked to stamp out paratemporal contraband. If she's not retired by this point, she's probably a very senior figure in the Agency.
There's an awful lot that our accountant friend doesn't know, for all his advanced tech.
It's not a SQL language, though, just a programmatic database with some nice query-by-example features. Intentionally not Turing-complete. Though of course every protocol evolves until it is...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 16 2010 03:37 AM (PiXy!)
1
Pixy, I just got hit by a spambot... and lost the past 7 days worth of comments on my sidebar. They're still in the posts, mind. Just like the last time... except this guy is selling jerseys instead of boots.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, November 20 2009 01:08 PM (C32SO)
2
Oh, and I've saved an example of the jerk's work in my "edit comments" page, if you want to take a look.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, November 20 2009 01:11 PM (C32SO)
There's a problem with spam and the way the system finds your recent comments; it doesn't quite all work. It will fix itself once I clear out the spam though.
The system looks at the most recently updated posts to find the most recent comments, but while spam counts as an update, it doesn't show in the recent comments list, so it all goes funny.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 20 2009 10:24 PM (PiXy!)
I'm running way behind on this one - it's been a hectic month, developing new systems, putting out forest fires, cruising the Aegean - but I have enough tracks together now to at least put up an early, incomplete relase.
Another reason for delay is that Summer Theologica has expanded into a double album, which wasn't at all as planned. I'll outline the tracks first, then paste in links as the files get uploaded to the server.
You can find our other recent works at SemiAutumnatic and Winter Collection. Part four of our tenth-anniversary collection, Unsprung, is scheduled to be released next month, if I can persuade the girls to get back into the studio.
Update: 14 tracks uploaded and ready to go.
Update: 4 more tracks - Gödel's Dilemma, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll.
Update: And two more, which I think will be all for tonight: Laplace's Demon and Russell's Teapot. Who knew that Bertrand Russell could get funky?
Updte: Two more tracks - Socrates' Method and Hume's Problem. Nearly done! There will be a third disc at some point with studio sessions of the live recordings and some remixes. I'm also going to move a couple of tracks around... Well, you'll see.
Update: Uploaded the closing tracks of discs 1 & 2: Anak Krakatau and Thera, respectively.
Update: All tracks and mixes uploaded. Done! That leaves me, oh, a whole day to get the next album out...
Robert Browning was one of the few writers I studied in high school English that I both respected and enjoyed. Shakespeare too, though his plays are far better seen than read. (The performance of King Lear we went to see got a standing ovation from a crowd of teenagers.)
The Seekers did take the melody for The Carnival Is Over from the Russian folk song Stenka Razin.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:17 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
| Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.
Thursday, July 26
Font Set Two Is In The Water!
Font set two, featuring the work of the astoundingly prolific Manfred Klein. I've only used a small selection of his work, the fonts I felt best suited to blog banners... Out of what I've downloaded so far. That still makes for over 160 fonts.
Just as I was preparing this post, I heard back from Manfred giving me the go ahead. So we're cool for school.
Samples in the extended entry; 164 files, total about 1.3MB.
Pretty cool, but some of those are basically illegible.
When I first loaded this page, the comment entry box and the Preview and Post buttons had become detached from the editor bar and were floating somewhere in the middle of the post.
When I clicked into the box, it jumped down here where it's supposed to be, but right now I'm looking at the Preview and Post buttons still loitering above the MyMedieval font. This is probably an IE specific problem. I've seen something similar happen on other mee.nu blogs.
Let me see what happens when I hit Preview.
*click*
Looks like everything is in its place now.
Posted by: Will at Friday, July 27 2007 01:26 AM (olS40)
Pretty cool, but some of those are basically illegible.
True. Some of them are just there for stylistic value; others are readable at larger sizes. Font Set One is a cleaner set of designs, reflecting the different intents of the two designers.
Since they're just for blog banners and no-one is forced to use any of them, I'm not going to worry if some are hard to read. (The really illegible ones I've already weeded out...) I wanted to provide a nice range of designs even at the expense of legibility.
The one where everything is trilaterally symmetrical is actually legible at larger sizes. Sort of.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 27 2007 01:48 AM (PiXy!)
3
Oh, and the one that is entirely illegible is braille. (Which you might have guessed.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 27 2007 01:51 AM (PiXy!)
4
You must be talking about the MK-Kleidos Chaplina font. I still can't make some of the letters out. The 19 CRT at home set to 1600 x 1200 was impossible. The 19" LCD at work set to 1280 x 1024 isn't much better. I had to hover over the image for the alt to even figure out the name.
Posted by: Will at Friday, July 27 2007 04:02 AM (SOx9v)
5
Yep. But in a larger font size, it looks like this:
Not very useful below about 60-point, I admit.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 27 2007 04:23 AM (PiXy!)
The problem I've been having is with licensing. There's a ton of fonts out there that are cheap or free, but 98% of the time there are restrictions on use. You can't use it for commercial purposes, or it's only licensed for one computer, or whatever. There are very, very few fonts that are under open-source style licenses.
Fortunately I was able to contact these two designers and they generously agreed to let me use these fonts. Otherwise I'd be limited to a handful of typefaces like Gentium, Charis, and Bitstream Vera, or paying hundreds of dollars per font for a site license.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 27 2007 04:01 PM (PiXy!)
Now that you have a real swarm of them, and given that they're mainly just for creating logos, you probably don't need any more.
A site license would be a real problem. IIRC, you're planning on selling this software eventually, aren't you? It's not just about creating a hosting service.
If you needed a site license for fonts, then so would everyone who bought your software. Obviously unacceptable.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, July 27 2007 05:48 PM (+rSRq)
