fickle: (Default)
Whatever you're doing right now, stop. Go read Little Brother instead.

Little Brother is the best book I've read all year. This would have more meaning if it wasn't the start of the year, so let me rephrase that. Little Brother might be the most awesome book that I could possibly read this year.

There's an excellent summary of the book here, so I'm not going to hash over the book. Instead, I'm going to give you bullet points as to WHY you should read it.

  • The author references our culture. Flashmobs, Linux distros, game systems being cheap but the games expensive, livejournal, Flickr, everything. And he gets it right! You've seen what happened when the media tried talking about Anonymous versus Scientology. This guy actually manages to create a believable 17-year-old narrator.
  • It's about Homeland Security and what happens when safety trumps freedom. The title's a homage to 'Big Brother' but unlike 1984, this book is set in our times. Modern times. It's much easier to get sucked into this book because the protagonist is our age and deals with our tech, instead of being an adult with a forbidden love affair.
  • On that note, the book deals with the generation gap and how adults are more likely to buy into the scare tactics of the media. But it doesn't present all adults as rigorously inflexible. There are good guys amongst the grown-ups, and bad guys amongst the kids, and the way that he manages to make moral ambiguity and self-righteousness a major theme of the novel is amazing.
  • Awesome female chars. There's not just the standard love interest and the best friend chick, but also female chars with authority, female chars who are bad guys, and female chars who rock the geek world. They're depicted as being as much a part of the world as the male protag is, and the author's Net-savvy enough to even have the protag be wary of one girl that IMs him because the protag knows how many guys like pretending to be girls online.
  • Race issues! It's a bit of a throw away in that it's not a major theme of the book, but that's part of what makes the sudden discussion of them so fantastic to me. There's a quick convo between the protag and a friend of his about how the friend will suffer more if they're caught, and the protag acknowledges that yes, brown people have the scales balanced against them. It's a tiny little thing, not a major part of the book, but oh, how fantastic it is to se it acknowledged as a part of real life instead of glossed over or forgotten about.
  • Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfeld, Brian K Vaughn, and I love it. I fully intend on buying copies IRL and making my friends read them. Since most of you are lucky enough to not live near me, I'm instead devoting the entirety of this post to trying to convince you to read it.


You know what else is awesome? The author himself and his thoughts on ebooks and sharing books/music online. His explanation for why he gives his books away for free online is quoted below, because it's just said so well that any attempt on my part to sum it up would pale in comparison to his original words.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

Neil went on to say that... )


Love him, read the book, and spread word of the book around as much as you can. This guy is one of us. He talks about our technology, he writes about our world, and he's good at it. He's a geek to the core, and one who doesn't back down from tackling politics head-on. I'd fangirl about it more, but I'm going to see if he's written anything else.
fickle: (kitten: so ashamed)
I am currently addicted to Mansion Impossible. It's a house market game where you have to try to buy/sell houses as fast as possible to get enough money to buy the 10mil mansion.

Definitely more interesting than Url Adex, which is a stock market-like game where you can buy and sell URLs. Kathy, thought you might like it though -- if you don't have enough math stuff to do during your daily life anyway! Everyone else, link'll cite me as a referral if you use it, but it's honestly a very slow-moving game. Or maybe I just chose bad URLs.
fickle: (fickle: polaroid smiling)
I was convinced that I wouldn't have Net this weekend and that I'd have to wish you a belated Happy Birthday on Monday instead but lo and behold, I have Net!

And thus, you have birthday wishes on time. XD If there's anything you want along the lines of fic or icons, just drop me a comment and I shall do my best to oblige. ♥

Also, just in case the subject line didn't make it clear enough:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CID!

Think of this as a celebration of your birthday. XD
fickle: (fickle: springtime of youth!)
I wrote a HP 7 drabble. For my new favorite HP char, who'll probably get an entry to himself to explain why I suddenly like someone from HP so very much. XD

Nick has stopped showing 'Help! I'm A Teenage Outlaw' which is pout-inducing but probably a good thing for my ability to get to bed at a decent hour on days I have work in the mornings.

I love the idea of the presidential candidates having answered questions from YouTube vids. I honestly think that it's a fantastic idea, and I can't wait to see excerpts from last night's debate popping up on YouTube. If anyone saw it (I'm in Austria and didn't find out about it until this morning), how was it? Which candidate impressed you the most? Who do you think fared the most poorly?

If you were running for president, what sort of vid would you create?
fickle: (technology: mac x vista)
China takes 'Net addiction very seriously.

The part that killed me was:

Addiction to the Internet is blamed for most juvenile crime in China, a number of suicides, and deaths from exhaustion by players unable to tear themselves away from marathon game sessions.

In 2005, a Shanghai court handed a life sentence to an online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for stealing his cyber-sword -- a virtual prize earned during game-play.


SUICIDES. DEATH FROM EXHAUSTION. Holy fuck, guys. I mean, I've stayed up for 40+ hours from insomnia but that's not the same as not being able to tear myself off the Net. I stay on the Net because I'm awake, not stay awake to be on the Net.

And apart from which, boot camp? BOOT CAMP? Some of my closest friends are people who I know because of the Net. How does that equal sociopathy due to not enough interaction with other humans? Gah. Who gets sent to boot fucking camp to cure Net addiction?

Not to mention that I'm exhausted enough to picture a camp full of shoes, pumpin' it to the max. High heels working that spine, sneakers flapping their tongues, laces really testing how much weight they can take, etc. It's a rather amusing mental image, though it does absolutely nothing to alleviate the absolute horror of being sent off to BOOT CAMP for Net addiction.

Really. BOOT CAMP. And in case you haven't got the point already, BOOT CAMP. Boot freakin' camp, man.

Edot: Okay, so this has nothing to do with Internet addiction at all, but for all the short, gorgeous girls on my flist who hate their height, here's an interesting little snippet about heights and celebs.

Christina Aguilera (5'2")
Eva Longoria (5'2")
Rachel Bilson (5'1")
Hillary Duff (5'2")
Britney Spears (5'4")
Kate Bush (5')
Jessica Simpson (5′4")
Jada Pinkett Smith (5′)


I'm the same height as Britney Spears and have better hair. Cool.
fickle: (technology: mac x vista)


"I wouldn't play you even to save the world."
"But would you play me to destroy it?"


Attribute the lines to anyone you damn well want. XD

In other news, I've been playing around with [livejournal.com profile] only_fiction nearly all day, trying to get tags lined up and indented in the sidebar. I did find something that would work for it, but it required me having a paid account and I am not getting a paid account for my fic journal. Nope, no way. I'll fiddle around with it some more tomorrow.

Plus, I now have an awesome Mac/Vista icon, courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] xinda and inspired by Allow which is a slashy Mac/Vista fic based off the this commercial. Yes, she wrote a fic that's over 6K of words based on a thirty-second commercial, and she made it interesting. Warning, fic in question might not be for the faint of heart since it portrays the two networking in great detail, but if you can take explicit slash, go for it.

[livejournal.com profile] googlebrat's Cybersex fic is still the best long series of techslash that I've ever read, though. It's what got me squeeing over Alienware, after all! Unlike the above rec, though, this fic is about real PCs and Macs and Linux and so geeky that it made me squee with every little injoke that I actually got.

In semi-geeky talk, I finally watched Spiderman 2 today, squeed a little more over Kyle Rayner (I will soon make a post saying why even non-comics people need to love him), and preened about the fact that [livejournal.com profile] xinda is very likely to visit me for AnimeBoston since my parents said that I can send her a hundred dollars to help with travel costs and a roundtrip plane ticket isn't much more than that. XDDD It'll be so awesome if she and Muse-y can make it.

I also stumbled across a fic that's Seto(YGO)/Lex(Smallville). This mostly amused me because not only do I like Smallville and have YGO as one of my main fandoms (despite [livejournal.com profile] katarik tempting me to the DC side, evil thing ^_~), but I've been RPing Ryuuji/Lex and Seto/Ryuuji lately. Though I really do think that Seto and Lex are alike and that the fic works well for what they were like when they were young. The author clearly has a good grasp on Seto and the driving forces behind him, and her Lex is precisely as w00bie-like as he is in the show.

Also, on a slash level, the Green Goblin in the first Spiderman movie is so, so gay. He's so gay, it even affects Norman and makes him slink on all fours, crawling over his own rug. I mean, if the mirror scene isn't slashy, I don't know what is. Speaking of which, I absolutely loved the actor there -- he did a fantastic job of changing his facial expressions to make the person in the mirror look completely different from himself. Green Goblin, sans costume, is disturbingly sexy. Why are the psychos always the cute ones?

I'm usually hard to please with movie-adaptions of source material that I love (one example being LotR, another being Catwoman), but the first Spiderman movie was pretty good. XD The second failed to reel me in as tightly, and I thought that Peter walking away from a guy he could see being beaten in front of him was kinda off-base, but the first was definitely good. Worth watching in my opinion, anyway.

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