The Path of Daggers

The Path of Daggers re-read at Tor Publishing

The Dreams and Speculation Discussion

I have to confess that I enjoyed this book more than the previous three books. I find that I'm more engaged in the good vs. evil context, and I'm less repelled, confused, or bored. That's not to say that all is good, but I feel more tolerant. Is it just me? Have I become more... submissive?

One of the most tedious aspects of the Wheel of Time (so far) is the unreflective dominance/bondage/submission theme. But I felt at least in Path of Daggers that the Aes Sedai played out the theme within a larger cultural background, more context-conscious and less prurient.  The reader sees the Aes Sedai clinging to the claims of knowledge and wisdom in their elaborate hierarchies even when actual knowledge is absent or lost, and that since the Asha'man (male channelers) and Dragon Reborn have become realities, the Aes Sedai are losing their certainties and must become more individually engaged in problems of knowledge and action, not merely asserting dominance and superiority. In other words, they seem more human. The scenes of the worst cringing, by the Kin (the not-so-secret-after-all ex-Aes-Sedai society) are alleviated by the mockery they suffer from the Atha'an Miere Windfinder and Wave Mistress channelers, who as outsiders (with their own deeply hierarchical dominance culture) aren't especially impressed by the Aes Sedai. The Forsaken have a more peripherally menacing role in this book, so we're not entertained by extended gratuitous torture scenes, nor are there many detail-relishing Aes Sedai debasing scenes, and Egwene doesn't have her bare bottom spanked, thank the Light.

I had the distinct impression that Path of Daggers benefitted from judicious editing, rather more than Crown of Swords. There were cases where I suspected that would-be drawn-out scenes were cut down to paragraph summaries — quite a relief.

Duplex printing for Brother HL-2170W laser printer on Mac OS X

I've been disappointed with this printer's lack of at least manual duplexing: you know the routine, print even pages, flip paper, refeed in the right direction, print odd pages. I use the same printer on my Windows bootcamp/VM, and that driver has a nice set of instructions and pictures, showing the user how to feed the paper in easy steps.

Anyway, after another stint of research, I found out where this is accomplished in the Mac OS X driver.

How to print duplex on Brother HL-2170W printer on Mac OS X

In short, the even/odd pages setting is under Paper Handling, not Layout.

Manual duplex printing from the paper tray

1. Choose "Print" from the File menu and open the Print dialogue.
   
2. Choose the "Paper Handling" option in the Presets.
   
3. Choose "Even numbered pages" and click on Print.

4. After the even pages are printed, remove them from the output tray, flip over the paper and place back into the paper tray, so that the printed pages face up, with the bottom edge first.
   
5. Again choose the "Paper Handling" option in the Presets as you did in the Step 2.
   
6. Choose "Odd numbered pages" and click on Print.

Photos: Rosalie and me, and Dad, 1964-1968

A few amusing photos that Rosalie pulled out of her album.

http://opally.tumblr.com/post/978594929/family-photos-1960s

She gave them to Dad, he scanned them, and sent them to me.

Me and my sister: our own culture.

Review: The Dying Earth

Please read and comment on my review of the audio book The Dying Earth by Jack Vance, published at Dreams and Speculation.
The Dying Earth influenced a whole generation of science fiction and fantasy writers who grew up in the 1950’s and 60's.

My life as an avatar, part 1: Kesmai

Since childhood, I always dreamed of being other than myself, being a better, stronger being, in a more beautiful, nobler world. As a child, this usually involved pretending to be a wild horse (yes, girls love horses) or enacting made-up dramas and comedies with stuffed dolls, trolls, or even Corgi and Matchbox cars. Any obect that spoke its personality to me could be a player in an impromptu, creative, dramatic experience.

I stumbled into a job at Kesmai in 1993, one of the earliest developers of multiplayer online games, where I discovered the joys and pitfalls of alternate realities. I became a devoted player of Legends of Kesmai, a thief named SoSneaky.

Source for this LOK screenshot: Shadow Bay Sentinel

Legends grew out of Island of Kesmai, an earlier MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), for which Compuserve customers --this was before the World Wide Web-- paid an expensive hourly rate for the privilege. It was an enhanced MUD (multi-user dungeon) that used an ASCII character generated map to enhance the mainly text-based interface. Remember that early computer monitors were monotone and did not display graphics (with the Atari and Commodore 64 as notable exceptions.

Review: The Name of the Wind -- and yay, I'm a guest blogger!

Thank you TJ at Dreams & Speculation for allowing me to be a guest reviewer! More incentive for me to read and write.

My review of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is here.

TJ has a lovely, popular book review blog focused on sci-fi and fantasy genres. I'm very impressed with what she's put together; she must be a reading and writing machine.

Tea party contradictions

Great reply by George R. R. Martin in response to a comment from a reader on his blog.

The blog post was about the eerie similarity he observed between a video of a Tea Party political rally or town hall meeting, not sure which, and the biergarten scene in Cabaret where a Hitlerjungend sings "Tomorrow belongs to me". I think George's observation is spot-on. He's picking up on the emotionalism of people, the kind of emotions that lead to fascism, as people cling ever more strongly to failing narratives about American individualism and American exceptionalism.

Pugix says (in his serious, professorial mode) that the Tea Party is a type of libertarianism. They want minimal government; they want to be left alone. The desire to be left alone by government was the founding impulse for Americans to move West. This may be why the Southwest part of the country demonstrates so well the consequences of libertarian pressure on government: note Arizona selling off their government buildings to try to meet debt obligations as a consequence of both economic downturn and severe cutting of taxes.

A Crown of Swords

Dreams and Speculation blog's Wheel of Time challenge

Tor's Wheel of Time re-read and synopsis by Leigh Butler.

I am tired of whining about the quality and characteristics of these books. This month I just plunged in, and read it as if I were AA-grinding in EverQuest. If you want a payoff, you knuckle down and endure the dreary bits. I'm glad to say I finished it a few days ago.

I'm getting better at skimming over useless redundant detail. I've settled in my mind that this is poorly-written plot-driven "young adult" lit, and I'm treating it as the smelly object it is, trying to enjoy a few sparkly bits here and there.

My attitude being less-than-serious, I'm not glaring at the details, demanding that they make sense, I'm just shrugging my shoulders and saying "whatever!" It's like watching a bad movie and saying to oneself, "what the heck, it's sort of entertaining, though the script/acting/costumes/setting/effects are wrong and stupid," which would be typical of most movies these days.

Margaret Atwood and Science Fiction and Space Opera

Over at TJ's Dreams and Speculation fiction review blog, I was surprised to learn that Margaret Atwood had denied that her books The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, saying "science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." According to Wikipedia she has since refined her objection, and described her work as social science fiction.

It made me think that she actually had in mind the sub-genre known as "Space Opera", which is light on the science, and heavy on the interpersonal and situational drama. Not that they can't go together.

Space opera on TV is the topic over at Dreams and Speculation.

Parallels VM configuration

Finally got my Parallels VM working.
Turns out Parallels 5.0.9344 doesn't really play nice in the Mac OS 10.6.4 environment. It's hogging memory, so... give it less memory. It has to be physically restricted.

Parallels preferences: Total memory allocated: Manual: 1456 Mb
VM Configuration:
  General: 1Gb memory (I have 4Gb total memory)
  Options: Optimization: UNcheck Adaptive Hypervisor 
           UNcheck autocompress 
           CHECK Tune Windows for Speed
           Optimize performance for Mac OS X applications 
  Options: Shared Applications: UNcheck Share Windows Applications with OS X 
           UNcheck Share Mac OS X Applications with Windows 

  Hardware: Video: Maximized video memory (256Mb on this MacBook Pro).

Removed my Parallels VM folder from Spotlight. 

I'm a bit miffed about the product's crappy support. I had to rely on other users discovered solutions to resolve a serious problem that affects many users.