Servusamanu.com

I recently just installed the Bad Behavior and WP-minify plugins. In the past, I’ve had a lot of spam-bots peruse the site and make obnoxious work of the place. Bad Behavior should help block a lot of that traffic from getting through. Wp-minify is used to condense some of the page coding to help improve load times. I’ve never really any speed issues with servusamanu, but every little bit helps, especially on slower connections.

In other news, I just finished reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. It’s definitely not quite the masterpiece of Crime and Punishment, the psychological musings of the protagonist are not nearly as visceral, but you there’s a similar appraisal of pride, morality, and justice within the piece. In total, I found the work entirely confusing. Sentence by sentence it seemed muddled and without any direction. By the end of section and the work as a whole it somehow came together. It’s a nightmare to try to dissect, because the individuals parts don’t seem to really contribute to the whole at all. If you take any individual paragraph out of the story and read it, you’d be hard-pressed to construct from that any sort of narrative at all. So much time is spent pulling out bit of the protagonist’s personality, but not directly and not even through interesting anecdotes. Rather, a paragraph of nothing gives up a phrase or a ‘tik’ in the wording that suggests part of the narrators mental state and history, but even that is nothing unless compared against similar giveaways later. The individual hints come across as nothing and only the aggregation makes any sense. It’s fascinating, and mind-boggling.

In a complete departure from Dostoevsky, the next book in the queue is Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame). I’m only a chapter or two in so I’ll save that for next week.

I’m also playing Napoleonic Total War. Excellent game, but my computer is choking on the battles. I need to toss some more RAM in, I think. Maybe soon, but not this week. I’ll be in New Orleans soon and it can wait till after that. I’m excited for the vacation. Images soon forthcoming…

Despite all the phenomenal stories, it turns out you can’t prevent yourself from being born…

I recently wrote a short story involving a shared electronic universe, something akin to a world of warcraft that people would upload themselves into.  In my story, individual member’s minds were functionally virtualized into the world.

In this sort of existence, the potential for apparent paradox exists.  If memory becomes digitized than the record could be altered beyond the knowledge of the memory itself and no temporal continuity needs to be maintained.  Paradox cannot truly happen, but the definition of a paradox can be stretched broader than necessarily apparent.  For example, it would be entirely possible for a person to go back in time,  kill themselves, and yet till exist.  The solution to the paradox is, of course, that the real world has changed the functional rules of the world in ways fully consistent with a larger existence.

That’s my general take of the article.  We don’t know what the larger rules are, but through an appraisal of how things appear to be, we can derive what our more localized rules must be.  Unfortunately, we don’t have any obvious capacity to confirm them.  If some greater body of rules is set to disallow the appearance of paradox, than we would have no ability to comprehend that; the rules would change to adapt any new information.  It’s sort of the ultimate Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Yep…fun stuff.

Beautiful Night Shots

I must have played Sim City 2000 for five years straight.  I made a thousand cities, some small farmer villages other suburban burgs lined with trees and schools.  I made epic metropolises that covered the ground like moss and rose into the sky, well beyond the long lost streets.  The later simcity games were even more visceral.  Simcity 4 was practically a city planning guide and my cities, all interconnected and interdependent, were amorphous and uncontrollable.  They ate away at the land and leveled entire mountains, expanding without any particular guide or reason.  Some cities I let flounder, others I forced higher and wider, hungry organisms intent on becoming organisms of their own.

While the later games, simcity 3000 and simcity 4, were visually stunning and phenomenal games, they lacked part of what made simcity 2000 special and not the least of that was the extended manual that came with the special edition (or perhaps commemorative edition, I don’t remember anymore.)  It was a standard game manual (back when games actually came with those.  Allow me a moment to weep over my long lost Baldur’s Gate manual, a dusty tome with faded pages and gold ink.  That was a masterpiece.)  The simcity 2000 manual came with a dozen essays and a similar number of images written about cities.  They described cities as homes of people and their lives and similarly as mindless corporate jails where the inhabitants are little more than guests.  They applauded the glorious gentrification of a decaying, forgotten neighborhood and bemoaned the crime infested grime of the city center.

Simple as that manual was, those writers are really what gave me an interest in ‘the city’ as something more than a crowded nuisance, a place to live while hoping to live elsewhere.  The photos found at .  A ghostly Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower looming over a darkened city, bright streets dizzying with activity, all cities as lived in and inevitably forgotten as Rome.  It is history, like a textbook, but it is current history and so it is very alien and tells a story without ignoring the details.

How do I want to introduce this island?  Japan’s version of an abandoned Arkham Asylum?  An island Chernobyl?  The world after an apocalypse?

Every once in a while Digg.com throws up a genuinely interesting article.   Given that I have a fondness for abandoned civilization, this particular article on Battleship Island, immediately caught my eye.  Like that article I linked to a ways back on abandoned Chernobyl, it’s really just a collage of images.  It’s a world that humanity abandoned, rather frightening, always mysterious.  Enjoy!

For more information Wikipedia has a rather expensive page on Hashima.

I did a little hiking and birding at Hawk Mountain, PA.  I didn’t take too many pictures, but we did see a Bald Eagle.  Note to all the world’s less than in shape hikers, the river of rocks travel is a a hike over a river of rocks.  It’s 100% rock scrambling with a thousand foot elevation change thrown in.  Fun times, but not exactly the easiest trail.  When they warn you about rock scrambling…they mean it.

I just back from Montana!  Here be pictures!

In no particular order I was in or near: Butte, Lake Flathead, Kalispell, Glacier National Park, St. Mary

Finally:  The Butte Airport in the morning.  (four flights a day, two in, two out.)

Does it become easier or harder to write fantasy/science fiction when new wonders are continually being built for real?

The Rak Jebel Al Jais resort, to belocated in the united arab emarites, looks, from these concept works, like a space colony or perhaps the village of a group of tibetan monks who have been dabbling with some serious technology. (Interesting story idea.) It was design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (Desert, the new Metropolist), who seem to specialize in creating larger than life structures. Enjoy!

Every once in a while I come across an article that is too cool to pass up even if it doesn’t really have much to do with anything.

KiddOfSpeed.com isn’t exactly the most visually appealing website and the english is sometimes a tad haphazard, but the story is amazing.

A motocycle ride through Chernobyl. That’s a story right there. If there’s any place on earth that could be called a cursed wasteland that’s it. Filled with abandoned towns, old communist propoganda, and irradiated forest, Chernobyl’s got it all.

This is my favorite page. A town, not found on any maps. For a hundred and fifty years everyone in the town had the same name. Creepy…

In one of the greatest ironies, the area around Chernobyl, abandoned for so many years now, has a blooming natural habitat. Nature is reclaiming its own from the irradiated wasteland. Some of the pictures are truly gorgeous, and these are the places that are somewhat safe to go. What lies deeper within?

*Queue Lovecraft*

Here’s the easy navigation page. Enjoy!

The last day at Niagara Falls went quickly. Leaving the tourist town for a bit, we drove out to Niagara-on-the-Lake, a little village sitting in the middle of the Niagara Vineyard District. Sadly, we passed on the ice wine.

We walked around Fort George,

spied on Fort Niagara a country away,

,

and visited the Casino again.

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That night we got our supplies together for the trip back. Canada was a lot of fun and it turned out everything was 10-20% off. Gotta love the exchange rate!

The next morning we drove home…=(, but it’s okay. It all ended with cake!

After traveling and only a preliminary exploration on Day One, we awoke the next morning (at about noon), ready to take on the great Niagara Falls. After breakfast…at Dennys.

The rest of the day of rather event-filled. We…

walked the town,

saw the falls,

found my future house,

saw the falls,

explored history,

saw the falls,

ate at the hilariously named but most excellent, ‘The Keg’,

saw the falls,

visited the casino,

and finally, after being dragged from food to gambling to thousands of tons of crushing water…we went to bed.