william gibson, explained
07/05/2012
Congratulations! You've just finished reading a William Gibson novel. You're at book one or two in one of his trilogies, right? Wondering who'll appear as a main character in the next novel? Never fear, we're hear to help. Just ask yourself these few, simple question and you're already ahead of the curve for the next novel!
Was the character a very major character? If yes, no, you'll probably never hear of them again. If no, they'll reappear like ghosts for the entirety of the rest of the series in marginal side series! But this isn't a perfect rule, so then ask yourself this:
Did they get a happy ending? Rate their ending on a scale from 1 to 10. 10? Never again. Don't even get any ideas. They have now become background lore to the universe. 5? Maybe you'll see them as a plot point or accomplice. Maybe. No ending at all? No idea where they went? They're gonna pop up like bindies for the rest of the series, always when you least expect it.
Last question, and this is important - are you reading The Sprawl trilogy, and were they The Finn? Because that motherfucker is like a cockroach. He passes through the books like an ugly transient, and always - ALWAYS - has a minor but integral part in the ongoing plot.
I know what you're thinking, and you're right - The Finn is the actual hero of The Sprawl trilogy. We just don't like to admit it, because he is the Susan Boyle of The Sprawl trilogy. An ugly, unpleasant reminder that the universe is amoral and heartless when allocating talent to the otherwise beautiful people.
I'll just let that sink in for you.
how the internet failed me
27/04/2012
So this happened today:
Me: "Hey internet, I'd like to buy an ebook!"
Internet: "Cool man, what you chasin?"
Me: "Count Zero, book two in the Sprawl trilogy! I just finished book one and want to keep reading!"
Internet: "Oh..."
Me: "Oh?"
Internet: "Yeah, oh...umm...this is a little awkward, but err... every single ebook store online has neglected to give Australia rights to that book. But you can buy book three! Would you like book three? Or how about a dead tree copy? Only three weeks postage!"
Me: "Yeah, no, I'm gonna try Isohunt instead, because this is some kind of bullshit."
But, in a thrilling twist, this then happened:
Me: "Hey Isohunt, I wanna steal a book!"
Isohunt: "Sure. Here. Fuck off."
Me: "Awesome! Thanks mate! This is grea--hold up, this whole thing, top to bottom, is filled with amateur-grade typos from shitty digitization software. FUCK."
Isohunt: "You get what you pay for, 'mate'."
And that's how I spent three fucking hours trying first to legally obtain an ebook copy of William Gibson's Count Zero, then a further half hour trying to illegally obtain a copy, only to be left with a typo filled PDF that I can't read for the glaring errors throughout. This is a failure in the process - that a publisher can arbitrarily say book one and three of a trilogy are available digitally in a country, but neglect to allow book two to be made available, is unacceptable. And I know, of course, that is their right to do so, but you know what? When I'd prefer to buy your book than steal it, why don't you just fucking sell it to me next time? If I ordered a printed copy you'd send it to me gladly, but I didn't want a printed copy, I wanted an ebook copy, and you decided that the middle book in a Goddamn trilogy would not be extended that privilege to a country outside the US.
I never understood, really, what the hubbub about ebook DRM meant before this moment, but now I get it, and the whole experience has left me phenomenally disappointed. Printed books are free, free to be bought and sold and lended and bartered anywhere on the earth, as long as a copy is available. And yet, despite that there will never (ever) be a shortage of ebooks, and that there will never be a community more international than the internet, licensing restrictions means I cannot buy an ebook because of where I live on the planet. And then, to make matters worse, I can't just 'lend' a copy of that ebook from someone else either who can legally obtain it - because DRM makes it impossible.
Even piracy failed me. I cannot, because of my country, read an ebook from the trilogy that directly predicted the internet and the rise of technologies like ebooks. This is Goddamn fucking ridiculous.
i just can't get on board with this safari
14/04/2012
So I engaged in an experiment this week, and in theory it should have gone swimmingly. I make no secret to anyone who asks that my opinion of Google is fairly low, but I rely on a lot of their services anyway as a consequence of being a living, breathing human in the 21st century. Gmail is superb, after all, and Google Reader is simply the only feed reading service worth investing any amount of time in. YouTube will always have the content I'm looking for, when I'm looking for it, and Google Maps can't be beat. I've made peace with these things; I can not like the company and still use it's best in field products. If I thought about it I could probably give you a really great rationalisation, but I don't have the energy for that sort of introspection.
But despite all that, I have started cutting Google from my online life in other ways. I switched to DuckDuckGo as my main search engine a while ago, and it's okay. It does some things better than Google Search, and it does some things worse, but overall I can live with it. My only complaint is its speed, or lack thereof, but they're young yet - it'll get better as they grow.
I also, a while ago, stopped using Google Docs, because the whole package is just a pain in the ass, and nowhere near the quality of Word or Pages. Calendars I switched to iCal with iCloud, so my schedules are always up to date on all my devices, and that's been working out great. But really, these are little things. They don't mean much because, apart from search, I didn't use them much to begin with.
What I do use a lot though, probably more than any other app on my computer was Google Chrome. So the experiment was to switch away from it, to Safari, to put me one step closer to a theoretically possible Google-free existence. Mobile Safari on iOS is great after all, logically, desktop Safari on OSX should be just as great, right?
...yeah, not so much.
For background, I switched to Google Chrome from Firefox over two and a half years ago, in the face of what then seemed to be a huge and still growing problem the program had with bloat. Google Chrome seemed smaller and snappier, and once I got used to it, and the way it did things (not to mention its then radical tabs-on-top approach) I became hooked. I was like a Firefox zealot of old, I was telling every motherfucker who would listen to ditch what they are using and come for a ride on this hot new thing. Some people even listened to me! It was great. I've never gone back. Fucking fuck Firefox.
Since them though I've switched back to Mac, and it always seemed a little strange to be using Chrome on OSX, partly because of my growing distrust (and occasional disgust) with Google and partly because long term Mac users seem to fucking love Safari. They can't get enough of it. So in an attempt to de-Google-fy my life a little more I thought I'd make the switch, just to see what it was like, and frankly...I was unimpressed.
It's not a performance issue. Safari is as snappy and fast as Chrome. It also boasts far superior history searching, and I like being able to open a page in a new tab just by command clicking a link. I think that's just fantastic, and wish Chrome did it - and if it does, and I'm retarded, I wish it made that option far more clear (edit: turns out I am retarded!). Readabilty mode is a Godsend, and makes otherwise ad infested shitpile sites reading pleasures - but that's where the niceties end. Boasting the same rendering engine and similar JavaScript performance, I have to make the judgement call on the experience, and Safari doesn't hold up.
It's not their fault, of course. Chrome is a Google flagship product, so it gets all sorts of crazy love and attention. They want you to surf the Internet and their thousands of ad partners with unparalleled ease and efficiency, and Chrome reflects that, at every turn. The Omnibar alone is a stroke of genius I tried instantly to replicate on Safari (via extensions), with mixed results, and it really hurt not having it. Also, the wasted vertical space of Safari's tab bar really grates on my nerves - as does its frankly annoying behaviour of disappearing when only one tab is open in the window. It feels like your vertical space is never consistent, and it detracts from the experience of browsing. I really just prefer Google's always on tab bar, chilling out up in what would otherwise be wasted space where the title would be anyway. It's a superior system, and uses precious resources more efficiently. I can't get used to tabs on bottom again, I left that shit behind with Firefox 3.whatever (and eventually, so did Firefox).
Subtly related to my tabbing gripes is the Safari bookmark bar - another useless monument to vertical pixel cannibalisation. I don't run with the bookmark bar turned on in Chrome anyway, but due to certain flaws in Safari's bookmarking and search engine systems, I was briefly forced to attempt it, and again, was left wanting. It's everything I hate in a bookmark bar, and more! I turned it off, and instead began hunting for one of the very few features I missed from my days in Firefox - bookmark keywords.
Now, to be fair, Chrome doesn't support bookmark keywords either - but what it does support is search keywords (as the Omnibar has no convenient drop down box to select alternate search engines) and this system can be pretty handily shoehorned to fill the same role - but as Safari doesn't even allow you to do that much (forcing me to use plugins and hacks just to enable DuckDuckGo as my search engine) I was left in the dark. With no bookmark bar and no bookmark keywords either, I was forced to make Safari's horrendously ugly bookmarks manager operate as my new tab page to work around it.
Now, instead of a clean screen showing my most recent and/or popular pages, I get to experience a UX abortion with cover flow for flavour every time I open a page. It's great work, a monument to horrendousness. I also missed Chrome enabling the bookmark bar inside the new tab 'page' without adding to chrome - it allows me to still make use of the bookmarks bar as a list of frequently used links that aren't used quite frequently enough to justify a keyword. It's a small feature, but without it browsing hurt. I missed it.
The last straw was attempting to enable a private browsing session. Again, Chrome makes quick work of this - Command-Shift-N or even right-click link -> open in incognito window. It's an approach that leaves you with the capability of running both incognito and openly at the same time. You can view a page as logged out to read forum posts of members you've ignored, while responding to them on a page as logged in to really make the ignore function unnecessary, because you're still letting them aggravate you regardless. Or whatever else. I don't know, that's what I use it for.
Safari's private browsing is either on or off, not invokeable with key commands, and hidden not in any menu you'd reach for first but under the 'Safari' menu. When I saw that it was kind of the last straw. Safari would be getting shelved again sometime in the near future, and we both knew it.
But let's be fair. Some of my complaints are probably just me being used to Chrome's way of doing things over Safari's, and that's fine. That'll always happen; I still miss Firefox's bookmark keywords to this day. But other things were just not as good, and I was in a position where if I was to use Safari every day, for the rest of my life, those components would need to be as good as Chrome's, if not better, for me to ever feel as productive and effective as I could be. And it's a tough pill to swallow, you know, because Google are creepy as hell and I want to distance myself from them as much as possible without fundamentally breaking my online existence, but it's looking like Chrome is a necessary evil right now.
Oh well. I tried.
Disclaimer: As I do in Chrome, I was attempting to use Safari with little to no extensions, as I feel the browser has to be able to speak for itself. The only extension I did use was OmniBar, and it was really just a pale imitation, thus my annoyance.
