Recommended Reading

Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst Yourselves

by Major Major Major Major| December 20, 20203:00 pm| 98 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading

Hello and welcome to a special holiday edition of Recommended Reading! Today we’ll be talking about our Light Solstice Reading Club selection, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. I’m so happy we could share this reading experience together. I didn’t remember much from my prior read, so this was almost like reading it for the first time. And what can I say? Pratchett is almost always good, but when he’s transcendent, he’s transcendent.

A drawing of Death as the Hogfather — I even made a fanart! Click to embiggen–WordPress made the preview look all mushy.

Hogfather tells the story of the time ~~Santa Cl~~ the Hogfather is, for lack of a better term, killed. By the assassin Mr. Teatime, which is of course pronounced the-ah-tim-eh, though everybody mispronounces it immediately, even if they’ve never seen it spelled. Death must step in and deliver the presents. Meanwhile a surplus of belief is sloshing around the Discworld, giving rise to the Oh God of Hangovers, the Eater of Socks, and more. We follow various heroes and villains as they navigate this new reality. In the end, balance is restored, reality’s humorless scolds defeated (for now).

Hogfather hits a real sweet spot for me: I’m a sucker for holiday specials, and like Neil Gaiman I think Death is Pratchett’s best character. This book is a pile of contradictions, a god-riddled argument for secular humanism, a rationalist’s paean to irrational belief, where Death is the only character who seems to understand the meaning of life. And it’s so well-engineered that it actually works. In the hands of a lesser author, so many things could go wrong. But they don’t, because this is Pratchett at the top of his very considerable game. Everything comes together in the end for a denouement that I’m not ashamed to admit made me cry a little. Especially Banjo’s fate.

When I read a paperback I dog-ear the bottom corners for favorite passages. I ended up with a lot for this one, sometimes on facing pages. So much to love in this book. As somebody who’s attended his share of Episcopal, Jewish, and Neo-Pagan solstice celebrations, I think Pratchett does a great job capturing the true meaning of Hogswatch–fire and blood, annoying relatives in paper hats, ancient rituals to chase away the smothering darkness with lights and pretty pictures. And big, stupid myths we tell our children. The tiniest worm in the ocean, a red flame in the crushing black depths, speaks volumes in this story. Its life is so irrational, striving against oblivion, and why?

Because otherwise, the universe is just a bunch of rocks moving in curves. Without our sometimes ridiculous applications of the anthropic principle–personified here as a professor–when the sun rises after the darkest day of the year, it’s just a ball of flaming gas. Without the Hogfather–or that silly, pointlessly red worm–we forget ourselves.

And that is why, at this time of the year, we light things on fire. Happy Hogswatch, everyone! What did you all think? Opening discussion question: what does Death sound like in your head?

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Need A Good Book? Why Not ‘The Starless Sea’?

by Major Major Major Major| June 22, 20208:00 pm| 162 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading, TV & Movies

In late February/early March, when everything was juuust starting to fall apart, I read a lovely book that enveloped me in a comfy fantasy world, much like the warm honey that is one of its motifs. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern’s sophomore novel, tells the story of… well, it tells a good number of stories. The throughline is Zachary, graduate student and son of a fortune teller, who is pulled inexorably towards The Starless Sea, a mysterious land full of stories, every story, all the stories.

Each of the book’s sections alternates chapters between Zachary and another text, often a storybook he has found. While it first seems like these are exposition dumps or thematically-appropriate asides, in the end it all weaves together to be a meditation on love, narrative, and the nature of stories. At its core, it is also a romance. Here is one example of an interleaved text, which should give you a good idea of whether you want to read the other pages; click through to see the end:

🔥

(from The Starless Sea by @erinmorgenstern) pic.twitter.com/xxfmuit7ue

— ꧁Tynan꧂ (@TynanPants) February 22, 2020

Looking at reviews to jog my memory, now, I’m seeing that some readers found it weird, pretentious, and too intertextual. But I won’t let that stop me! Besides, I have a feeling there are more than a few weird, pretentious lit-crit types here. I can see where the reviewers are coming from, though. And it does take a little work, as with any non-linear narrative. So if you find such things off-putting… you have been warned. I’ll file this one under “it’s not for everyone, but it is for me.”

Consider this a recommendation thread for all your book, TV, movie, etc. needs! I’ve been watching Bosch, which one of you yokels recommended, and it’s pretty good. Going to start Homeland and Upload soon. What about you?

Need A Good Book? Why Not ‘The Starless Sea’?Post + Comments (162)

Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light Reading

by Major Major Major Major| May 13, 202012:22 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

Part three of a series on artificial intelligence.

My earlier posts on this topic dealt with some fairly sophisticated text-generation AI’s from the present and (likely) near future. But most of the AI you experience is very mundane, and often slips under your radar. AI is more ubiquitous than you may hope… and significantly stupider than you may fear.

So goes the thesis of Janelle Shane‘s newish book, You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works And Why It’s Making The World A Weirder Place. It’s an easy-to-read, fun introduction to what AI is, what it is not, how it works, and how it doesn’t. And it has very cute illustrations. Here is a brief introduction to some of the concepts in the book, told much less accessibly than Shane does, alas. Please bear with me for a moment.

What we call AI is many different things doing different tasks in different ways. Much of the time you hear about AI, it’s about deep learning. What is deep learning? It’s actually just a highly lucrative rebranding of multilayer perceptron neural networks, which have been around in one form or another since the 1960’s. What is a perceptron? Inspired by neurons, perceptrons convert a series of inputs to a single output via a weighting function. Let’s imagine a shape-classification perceptron with inputs like ‘number of corners’, ‘ circumference:area ratio’, and for some reason ‘color’. This would begin with random weights–let’s say it thinks ‘number of corners’ is very very important. But each time it calls a diamond a square, the weights are adjusted, just a little, so that it will be less wrong in the future (or so we hope). Where can this go wrong? Let’s say that the data this perceptron is trained on contains a lot of shapes from playing cards. It would end up learning that color was highly predictive. In the future, when you showed it a red circle, it would probably tell you it was a heart!

A multilayer perceptron is simply when perceptrons feed into each other. So the next one in the chain would consider the output of our ‘which shape?’ perceptron, alongside other data, when performing its own task. You can probably see how this compounds errors in odd ways. Most of the time an individual perceptron’s rules are ineffable, so these things can be rather hard to debug.

Take the example of Microsoft’s image-classification AI, Azure. It was very good at identifying pictures of sheep while it was being trained. But when it was put to the test, it identified any green pasture as a picture of a sheep! It also saw giraffes everywhere. It learned that ‘giraffe!’ was often a better answer than ‘I don’t know’, probably because there were a few too many pictures of giraffes in the training data. And if you asked it how many giraffes there were, it would give you a weirdly high number–because the training data didn’t have any pictures of individual giraffes. This stuff can get very weird, very fast. As Shane illustrates in her book,

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Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer

by Major Major Major Major| August 9, 20191:30 pm| 159 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Recommended Reading

Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.” I suspect that this phenomenon is more intense in works of speculative fiction* than, say, spy thrillers. These stories are well-positioned to plumb and amplify the pressing issues and paranoias of their times; more to the point, they often offer high-concept utopian solutions, be they progressive or reactionary.

So I was amused to see the Guardian ask: Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians?

In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president.

[…] But our novel is just one of several recent stories of queer women time-travelling. There is Kate Heartfield’s Nebula-nominated novella Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel Alice Payne Rides, which see two 18th-century women – lovers – become embroiled in a war. There are also Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline.

[…] I wrote to each of these authors in anticipation of this piece and it turns out we were all drafting our books in 2016.

The article is a quick and a good read. I haven’t picked up This Is How You Lose the Time War yet, but it’s near the top of my list. I did read two books last year that featured time-traveling lesbians, though, just chewing through a random pile of space opera.

This article reminded me of a fun piece on Doctor Who**, which found that the Doctor was significantly more likely to overthrow the government during the Thatcher era.

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Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural BarometerPost + Comments (159)

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Wetsuit optional.

We have all the best words.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Shelter in place is one thing. shelter in pants is quite another.

We still have time to mess this up!

I don’t care how fun he is after a few whiskies. fuck that guy.

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

This fight is for everything.

What fresh hell is this?

Too inconsequential to be sued

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Good luck with your asparagus.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The revolution will be supervised.

I’m only here for the duck photos.