Media
Books
Return to top.C.S. Lewis
Return to top.- Till We Have Faces - A retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, very haunting
- The Chronicles of Narnia - His best know work, and very good, but there's so much more.
- The Space Trilogy - I love C.S. Lewis. I like the Space Trilogy. Mostly, I'm glad its his only attempt at Sci-fi.
- The Great Divorce - His opinion about Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell".
- Mere Christianity - A classic work laying bare the essentials of Christianity.
William Gibson
Return to top.One of the founder's of the Cyberpunk genre. He's also credited with coining the terms "cyberspace". Official Webpage. This is not meant to be comprehensive, merely a list of works I've read. I would love to read more of his stuff, but time and money conspire against me.
- Blog - William Gibson's blog. Although, he apparently decided to get back to his day job and pick back up on writing works of fiction.
- Neuromancer - Published in 1984, this book was before most people had heard of the internet. A dark future of corporate control, it presents some very interesting social issues. Despite being almost 20 years old, its not the least dated.
- Idoru - Published in 1996. One of this books main characters, the Idoru, is an AI actress. If you like this, you may like the movie Sim0ne.
- Johnny Mnemonic - This is a short story of Gibson's, but it was also made into a movie starring... Keanu Reeves. The movie's okay, but made better by the fact that you can find it at Wal-Mart in the el cheapo bin.
Bruce Sterling
Return to top.Bruce Sterling is another cyberpunk author. His stuff is pretty interesting, and his activity online is somewhat interesting as well. This page has some more if you're really interested in his stuff.
- The Hacker Crackdown - Nonfiction, this is one of my favourite works of his. Its a (admittedly biased) history of the major law enforcement crackdown on "hackers" in the 1980's. Its also available for free online.
- Viridian Design Movement - An "art movement". He decided to found an art movement. To top it off, it even came with an expiration date - 2012, the date the Kyoto accords set for major declines in CO2 emissions.
- Dead Media Project - How many of you have computer media that can no longer be read because of death of the medium or the equipment to read it? How stable is all this information we're storing on all these computers? I mean, there are plenty of Egyptian scrolls and Sumerian clay tablets that have survived for thousands of years, yet CD-R's have a life expectancy of 10 years(at best), and hard drives and magnetic tapes have their own problems. Are we living in a Dark Ages to future generations, who will be unable to access all the records of this age?
General
Return to top.- Motivation and Personality, by Maslow
- The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
- Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by DiSanto, et. al.
- Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. If you ever wanted to understand what paranoid schizophrenia and Conspiracy Theorists have in common. You might go a little nuts if you read this at a bad time in your life.
Travel
Return to top.In the summer of 2002 I travelled around the country on a Greyhound bus pass. In the course of preparing for that trip, I did a survey of "travel literature". Some of these I had read earlier in life, and some were new to me, and many of them require a little creativity to count as "travel literature"(thinking "spiritual journey" might help).
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. Probably the original inspiration for my trip if anything. I read this book my sophomore year in college, and it had a profound effect on my life. How do you define "Quality"?
- Lila, by Robert Pirsig. The sequel to Zen and the Art, this time its a boat trip.
- The Odyssey
- The Aeneid
- Gulliver's Travels
- On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Superficially the most like my trip, in actuality probably the furthest from it. Kerouac is considered one of the primary members of the "Beatnik" generation. Its an interesting book, but its not my favourite
- Marco Polo I have a heavily footnoted version from the Victorian period. The footnotes are almost as amusing as the story itself. Its a really cool book.
- The Inferno, by Dante. Okay, its not the most pleasant travel book of all time, but it does rank as an interesting journey.
- Kon-Tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl. The guy believed that South Americans had populated the Polynesians. This idea was thought to be impossible, so he built a balsa wood raft and sailed from Peru for the Polynesians. 4300 miles and 101 days later they drifted ashore.
- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Another pleasant travel novel.
Sci-Fi
Return to top.- Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. A very cool book about a boy general who will save mankind.
- Dune, by Frank Herbert. The Greatest Sci-Fi of all time. This is not a point for discussion.
- The White Plague, by Frank Herbert. A biothriller before all the others.
Neal Stephenson
Return to top.Neal Stephenson is one of my favourite authors, especially fiction. Perhaps the greatest compliment anyone has ever paid me was Buck Baskin's comment, "You know, you're a lot like a character from a Neal Stephenson novel, a little nuts." Anyway, some of these are available on the internet(listed separately). Oh yeah, I really hate being a fan boy. So if you accuse me of being a Neal Stephenson fanboy, I will rip your face off and feed it to you. Oh yeah, if you're interested in Neal Stephenson's presence on the web, his site at the well and a commerical site.
The Baroque Cycle
- Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle - The first one, already out. I'm sure its really cool. Yeah, I'm so baroque I can't afford to buy the first one in the series. Of course, I won't cry if someone gets it for me...
- Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle - April 2004
- System World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle - September 2004
Other Books
- The Big U - What happens when you're university goes off the deep end? What disturbed me most about this book, is that, well, it didn't disturb me. After being in college for 7 years, my general reaction to people who have obviously lost it is to just laugh. Apparently this book is a little underground and hard to find. I loaned my copy to Johnny Feng. Johnny's cool, he gave it back before he left for New Orleans. I had to threaten to hurt him though.
- Zodiac - I have not quite had the same taste for seafood since this Ecothriller. Really, toxic waste scares me a little more thanks to this book.
- The Diamond Age - A wonderful book about nanotechnology, culture, and education. The inspiration for the eventual goal of a lot of my research.
- Cryptonomicon - An awesome historical fiction. If you know who Godel, Turing, Church, Schneier and Riemann are, and understand their work, you'll probably think its cool too. Others thought it was cool, but you have be a little off-kilter into the math world to really have fun with it.
- Snow Crash - A classic cyberpunk novel. A slightly happier version of Gibson's view of cyberspace. Anyway, a book where you can use words like "Neurolinguistic Hacker" HAVE to be cool don't they?
Available Online
- Mother Earth Mother Board
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html- The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
An article about the laying of the longest(at the time) fiber optic cable in the world. Contains a well written history of undersea cables as well as the practical issues in laying cable. Having cooped for a Telco, I can say this, the normal everyday laying of cable is not nearly so romantic as Stephenson portrays, but he reveals the true feat of engineering that goes into what many consider to be an everyday occurence. Cable lays may be more boring than he states, but with insight into the problems, I would go do it any day if given the opportunity.
- In the Beginning was the Commandline
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html- About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) "productized."
If you ever wanted to know some of the magic computers hold for some people and why they are far cooler than some would like you to think, go read this. Also a good introduction to the "politics" of different technologies and the worldview that comes with them. The philosophy of programming.
Movies
Return to top.Fantasy
- Hook - Peter Pan grows up.
- Legend - A fantasy movie about unicorns, true love, and the trickster myth staring Tom Cruise.
- Krull
- Willow - Basically, released in 1988, it stars a "halfling" rescuing the world. I mean, this is a movie for Lord of the Rings fans who just knew that no one would ever be able to make it into a movie.
Bruce Campbell
- The Evil Dead - A cult classic, and filmed in my hometown, Morristown, TN.
- The Evil Dead II
- The Army of Darkness(Evil Dead 3)
Sci-Fi
- 12 Monkeys
- 13th Floor
- Strange Days
Philip K. Dick
A famous sci-fi writer, several of his works have been turned into movies. An interesting Wired article about the movies of his books.
- Blade Runner
- Impostor
- Minority Report
- Total Recall - A movie starring the governor of California.
John Carpenter
John Carpenter does everything - he writes, directs, and composes the music for his movies. Not long ago, I decided that he probably thinks these are serious attempts at good movies... I think they are utterly horrible. In fact, they are SO bad that they are hilarious to watch. Some of the funniest bad movies of All Time, and they almost always involve Kurt Russell.
- Escape from New York - In 1997 Manhattan has become a maximum security prison.
- Escape from L.A. - Same plot, different location.
- Ghosts of Mars - This story had potential. It could have been a great, or at least good, sci-fi action/mystery movie. It wasn't. The special effects were not so great, the acting was bad, and the writing was... well, maybe the acting was good, they delivered the lines without busting out laughing at some horrible cheese. As a special bonus, it stars Ice Cube. Another worthy John Carpenter flick(one that doesn't even star Kurt Russell!).
- Big Trouble in Little China - This is truly a great classic. Kurt Russell is a truck driver who gets sucked into a mystical battle invovling a cursed wizard in Chinatown in San Francisco. It even stars a basket-for-a-hat-who-rides-lightning who could probably be a precursor for Raiden in Mortal Kombat. This is a must see movie.
Music
Return to top.Web Comics/Cartoons
Return to top.- Killfrog - Amusing flash cartoons like Little Suzy Experiment and Ultimate Survivor
- Stick Figure Death Theatre - Stick Figures tearing each other up Kung-Fu/Matrix style. Awesome.
- Stick Figure Fighting Movies - More Stick Figure Kombat.
- Homestar Runner - Another series of flash cartoons.
- User Friendly - A comic strip about an ISP with a dustball come to life, Cthulu, an AI, an evil genius with a fake Russian accent, and a Microsoft Junkie among other amusing characters.
- Dr. Fun - The first comic on the World Wide Web. Some of the more entertaining ones include:
- Doctor Who - Although Doctor Who has had many incarnations in several different media forms, the latest incarnation is as a flash cartoon. Despite its utter campiness, I have fond childhood memories of watching Doctor Who in syndication on PBS with my dad.
- Broken Saints - A VERY long movie done as a flash animation. Impressive for its ambitious scope if nothing else.
