Russell Davies

operations room

kindle book 34. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. I loved this. These are specially loved:

"You heard it first as a kind of aggressive quiet. The whoosh and snarl of the desert all around us was still going on, but somehow it was subsumed by this deep, bass silence. Then you could feel it as a coldness in your knees and ankles, an unsteady, heart-attack feeling of weakness and vibration. A bit later it was audible, a thrumming gnognognogg which echoed in your lungs and let you know you were a prey animal today."

"the sounds you hear are the sounds of real people working hard on things they can hold, eat and use."

"Boardrooms are rooms to show how important you are. This is an operations room. It is a place where you do important things."

"You don't make strategy so that there's one path to victory; you make it so that as many paths as possible lead to something which isn't loss."

forces of brightness for me

Kindle book 33. Reamde by Neal Stephenson. You're not that surprised I read that are you?

This is true:

"People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel."

The power of MacGuffins and, maybe, iPhones:

“You will have noticed that many if not most works of fantasy literature revolve around physical objects, usually ancient, imbued with numinous power. The Rings in the works of Tolkien being the best-known example.” Richard, hiding his face behind his pint for a moment, made a plausible guess as to the meaning of the word “numinous” and nodded agreement. “There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. I am merely describing,” D-squared added, with a flick of the fingers, “pulp. But the vast popularity of, say, a Devin Skraelin, attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”

"“The point is,” said Don Donald, “that it works. Put a magic gem in a story and it grabs the reader. This can be done shamelessly, or with more or less artfulness, according to the tastes and talents of the author. I should say that Tolkien got it right by layering atop it a story about good and evil. The numinous mineral object is now also a technology; it has been imbued with power by a sentient will who possesses some sort of arcane wizardry. It can only be unmade by exposing it to a certain geological process that, being geological, is prior to, and takes precedence over, any work of culture.”

This is the bit that's lasted longest. This simple, eternal way of dividing culture:

"Forces of Brightness. Earthtone Coalition"

First world opportunties, eastern solutions:

"Engineering! Another luxury of nationalities with huge populations and intact landmasses."

"Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children."

Know-it-allness is important.

"One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology."

Ha!:

"This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing."

Meetings not necessary:

"This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it"

 

 

 

mike and brian

Kindle book 32.The Innovator's Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next by Steven Johnson.

Two little bits. Something good about Mike:

"And Michael Jordan, perhaps the most creative basketball player ever, had a “love of the game” clause inserted into his contract; he insisted that he be free to play pickup basketball games anytime he wished."

And what Eno does:

"First of all, the very fact of having somebody who isn’t in the band and who is suggesting new ways of working is in itself very powerful. Because that person is not part of the political/ diplomatic situation within the band itself."

a year ago

I don't know if this is healthy or not, but I spent quite a lot of Sunday evening reconstructing last week a year ago via various social media and 'this is what you were doing a year ago' services like Timehop, OhLife, Flickr and that.

Aside from the heightened drama of personal circumstances we did Radio Roundabout, GDS offered me a job, I quit R/GA and I went on one of the most miserable and pointless business trips of my life.

It was a big week. Scary in some ways. But it's worked out very well.

Fragments from that week:

writing wrong

Sometimes the copy and the code don't quite chime.

ghost mail

Finally, a proper book. Book 31 was Follow Me Down by Kio Stark. I'm lucky enough to know Kio a bit and I had to apologise to her that I only highlighted two words in the whole book. It was mostly because I was too gripped by actually reading the thing to worry about what I might keep on my kindle. It's a fantastic book.

On the other hand, the two words do, sort of, sum it up:

'Ghost mail"

annoying gods

Book 30 was Supergods by Grant Morrison. It was like his comics, sometimes brilliant and often self-indulgent and annoying. I didn't highlight the annoying bits:

"With a keen sense of ironic symmetry, the comics arrived as ballast alongside the US service personnel whose missiles threatened my very existence. As early R&B and rock ’n’ roll records sailed into Liverpool to inspire the Mersey generation of musicians, so American comics hit in the west of Scotland, courtesy of the military-industrial complex, to inflame the imaginations and change the lives of kids like me."

"We live in the stories we tell ourselves. In a secular, scientific rational culture lacking in any convincing spiritual leadership, superhero stories speak loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations. They’re not afraid to be hopeful, not embarrassed to be optimistic, and utterly fearless in the dark."

"(It was O’Neil who came up with my favorite description of comic-book dialogue and captions: “headlines written by a poet.”)"

"Then, as if handing me the keys to the jet pack, my dad bought me a typewriter and taped a message to the inside of its case: “Son—the world is waiting to hear from you."

"he favored long, horizontal panels that re-created how the cinema screen looks from the audience’s point of view. The artists who were able to adapt to this new trend were masters of scale and perspective, and they framed their shots like the directors of Hollywood spectaculars and science fiction blockbusters"

"Here in the twenty-first century we’re surrounded by proof that we tend to live our stories. As I brought this section to a close, one last synchronicity directed my attention to an article in New Scientist’s February 12, 2011, issue about the work of William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington, Virginia. Casebeer, a neurobiologist, goes so far as to suggest that certain narratives are as addictive as cocaine, commenting on the effects a compelling yarn might have upon the minds of enemy soldiers or suicide bombers. He is convinced that we should be investigating the military potential of stories, by creating “counter-narrative strategies” engineered to undermine or oppose the religious or political storylines that inspire war, oppression, and greed."

we're a service

Books 28 and 29 were Tinker Tailor Solider Spy and Our Kind Of Traitor by John Le Carre.

Hadn't read these for years. I guess it was prompted by the film. Tinker Tailor is full of gorgeous slices:

"Taking the marble he slowly rolled it round his hard, powdery palm and Roach knew at once that he was very skilful at all sorts of things; that he was the kind of man who lived on terms with tools and objects generally."

"a private Kim’s game to preserve his mind from the atrophy of retirement, just as on other days he learnt the names of the shops along his bus route to the British Museum; just as he knew how many stairs there were to each flight of his own house and which way each of the twelve doors opened"

"She’d been hanging around ever since, cooking nut rissoles and playing the flute"

"‘Sweat them, George. Tempt them, bully them, give them whatever they eat.’"

"he had the battered look of someone just arrived from a bad journey"

"‘George is like a swift,’ Ann had once told Haydon in his hearing. ‘He cuts down his body temperature till it’s the same as the environment. Then he doesn’t lose energy adjusting.’"

And I loved this from Our Kind of Traitor:

"We’re not hired to rock the boat. We’re here to help steer it. We’re a Service.’"

 

 

 

 

 

34

Kindle book 27. Rule 34 by Charles Stross.

If you've just got interested in 3D printing you should read this, a gritty detective story in a grubby 3D-printed world.

"The good law-abiding folks—they’re welcome to run off Rawlplugs and coffee coasters and plastic Nessie tat for their weans. But the Polis don’t like unmonitored fabs. They could be making anything."

"when you mix memes with maker culture, you have something even weirder"

This is well-put:

"Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model"

And this is a thing:

"A detective can never have too many pockets, your uncle Bert told you. He wasn’t wrong, but a quarter century later, the fashion industry still hasn’t caught on to the existence of female cops.)"

predator rhythm

Book 26 on the Kindle. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. I know this was good. Everyone said so, but I'm not sure I finished it. Felt like something you didn't have to read yourself, everyone else would read it for you.

These bits stuck out though:

"The Paleolithic rhythm actually reflects the “predator rhythm,” since the great hunters of the animal world, the lion and other large cats, exhibit the same style: hunting to exhaustion in a short burst and then lounging around for days afterward."

"Grandparents are the conduits of culture, and without them culture stagnates."