(no subject)

[trochee]

Notes today, ordered from most personal to most geeky:

• I am visiting a therapist [DH] this afternoon tomorrow afternoon (he cancelled for an emergency) for the first time. This is an initial (mutual) interview to see if we work with each other.
• imtboo leaves for NYC tomorrow. Her elbow looks much better today (I helped her change the bandages this morning).
• Thanks to imtboo, I have started using Google Calendar. It is what I wanted a calendar to be. Google rather disturbingly keeps doing the Thing I Want perhaps a few months after I've decided I Really Need It (decent mail program, RSS reader, now calendar).
• I am reading more Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas. Actually, I think that Banks' "Culture" was probably founded from Google. Both:
  • keep giving their citizens and contacts Things They Want
  • are apparently semi-democratic
  • are heavily technophilic
  • are firmly rooted in the belief that their organization itself is a Good Thing
  • seem to want nothing but loyalty in return
  • may have an unsettling blackops "Special Circumstances" division.
• I just discovered gtkpod and I am very very impressed. I went from no knowledge to a downloaded, installed, working iPod setup on Ubuntu in about an hour, including the research. Next tasks -- podcast catching (gpodder? anybody have other Ubuntu suggestions for podcast catching?), and get the gtkpod to synchronize with my Google Calendar. Mwahaha.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

In the US those books have only recently been reprinted, and in the annoying "oh this is good so we must make the trades expensive" tall format, instead of the usual $US7 mass-market forms. I was lucky and found Consider Phlebas in a used bookstore but I will keep my eyes open for others.

I need a notes file for authors-to-look-for in bookstores...

I am unhealthily interested in the Culture -- it may be a bit of a Rorschach anthropology, but I see in it an idea of some kind of technophilic anarchosocialism. I just can't be sure I'm not also seeing a kind of Omelas -- who suffers for the Culture to exist? If Look to Windward is an example, it's the bigots and violent paranoid xenophobes -- but is even that okay?

interesting questions are posed. And not answered, which I like.

[solri.livejournal.com]

but is even that okay?

It's okay by me!

As for anarcho-socialism, that is Iain Banks' philosophy in a nutshell.

BTW, his non-Culture books are worth reading too (with the possible exception of a few that are just too weird to be enjoyable). They are all very different, to the extent that they look like they're written by different people, but they all share a similar outlook on life and society. You might also enjoy A Few Notes on the Culture