More Words About Books

There’s an old George Carlin quote that I think about from time to time. I saw the man himself perform this monolog live, several times. A small line from the speech has become a bit of a meme now that Carlin has passed: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” It’s a slogan for anyone who rightly recognizes...

In Software “Engineering” (This is a well and truly lost battle, but I’ve always cringed at calling ourselves ‘engineers’ despite most of us barely knowing how to change a tire) there is a methodology known as CI/CD. It stands for Continuous Integration and Continues Delivery (and Deployment). This methodology has become so ubiquitous that many developers may not even remember...

Content Warning: Conceptual discussion of suicide, death, illness Imagine, if you can, that a humanoid owl creature approached you and offered to give you the strangest sexual experience of your life and/or to make you immortal. As you lay there in post-coital bliss, enjoying your nicotine product of choice (because I know you freaks, and I know you lack Sam...

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson was one of the more divisive cyberpunk books we’ve covered. While the book’s core themes remain relevant and interesting, the style, characters, and execution were, at times, painfully dated. For many of our listeners, the deeper themes that pulled from real academic theories were lost in the wash of “cringey” 90’s nonsense that they were...

In an unfinished time travel story called “The Lost Road,” J.R.R. Tolkien expressed a sentiment about the status of Germanic myth and language in intellectual circles that is more true today than it was at the time he wrote it. “And summer slipped by, and he went to school and went on learning Latin. Also he learned Greek. And later,...

William Gibson’s Virtual Light was released in 1994. Also released in 1994 was Netscape Navigator, the first internet browser to combine text with inline images. It was a time when businesses that bothered to have an internet presence at all advertised their America Online keyword before they advertised their URL. The Internet was young. The barrier to entry was still...