ironSoap – Complete

The Joy of Books (by crazedadman)

This. So many times over.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 10, 2012 at 08:24AM

@ironsoap — January 09, 2012 at 03:21PM

@ironsoap — January 09, 2012 at 03:10PM

It has become a tradition. Every year, Facebook reminds people who log in on January 6th that it is my birthday. It’s so easy to click the name and write a pithy wish for happy day. No longer do people need calendars or reminders or memory, Facebook handles the effort for them.

Perhaps people are going to assume by this that I’m demeaning the effort of Facebook birthday-wishers, but I assure you that isn’t the case. I’m surprised that people don’t completely ignore my birthday, for the most part. Even taking a low-resistance path and flooding my Facebook wall with well-wishes is more than I’m probably deserving of.

I don’t hate the birthday bonanza, I just think it’s strange and kind of funny. So this year I thought I’d take the posts I received and do a bit of statistical analysis on them, just for kicks. The fruits of my labor follow:

• First Post: 01/05/2012 15:44
• Total Posts: 40
• Exclamation Points: 80
• Average Exclamation Points Per Post: 2
• Most Exclamation Points in a Single Post: 22
• References to Relationship With the Poster (cuz, nephew, etc): 5
• Number of Personalizations (mentioned me by name): 16
• Number of Other Addresses (mr, sir, dawg, etc): 5
• Number of Friends Referring to Me as “Dawg”: 1
• Call-Outs of My Age: 2
• Wishes Regarding the Quality of the Date (other than “Happy Birthday”, such as “have a great day”): 16
• Uses of the Exact Phrase, “Happy Birthday”: 35
• Shortest Post, In Number of Characters: 9
• Longest Post, In Number of Characters: 138
• Median Post Length: 65
• Average Post Length: 40
• Total Characters: 1,612
• Amount of Posts That Solely Consisted of Variants of “Happy Birthday”: 8
• References to My Family, Wife or Daughter (Not Counting Posts From Wife and/or Daughter): 4
• Terms of Endearment: 3
• Affirmations of Affection (“I love you,” “love ya,” “xoxox”, etc): 7
• Abbreviations: 6
• Likes on Birthday Related Posts: 2
• Typos: 3
• Number of People Featured in Profile Pics Across All Birthday Posts (as of this writing): 55
• Number of Weird, Hybrid Monster Cartoons in Profile Pics Across All Birthday Posts (as of this writing): 1
• Blood-related Family Members Posting: 12
• Marriage-based Family Members Posting: 5
• Non-family Members Posting: 23
• Emoticons and Other Adornments: 5
• Amount of Posts Containing the Word or Variants of “Birthday”: 40
• Final Post: 01/06/2012 21:57
• Duration of Birthday Bonanza, In Minutes: 1,813

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 09, 2012 at 02:21PM

@ironsoap — January 09, 2012 at 08:43AM

author: Peggy Orenstein
name: Paul
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/01/08
date added: 2012/01/08
shelves: non-fiction, sociology
review:
As the father of a two year-old daughter, I’ve seen first hand the dramatic leap into pretty/pink/poofy/princess gear and garb that seems to happen far faster and far more completely than I ever would have considered. My daughter is a girly-girl, enchanted by hairdos and pretty nail polish and singing princesses. I knew a lot of this was uncomfortable to me from her earliest months, but I admit that there are certain battles that, in the individual moments, don’t feel like they’re worth having. If I take her to the dollar section at a bog box store and tell her to pick out something (within reason) and she selects a Hello Kitty notebook over a fairly neutral one with a giraffe or a red-and-orange striped pattern, well, I told her to pick didn’t I?

But these concerns that lurk in the back of my mind, primarily focused on the self-centeredness of princess as a concept, the fixation on external appearance, the raw entitlement inherent in royalty fantasy and the materialistic reverse sublimation when the term is adopted by older children or (sigh) adults. So I was enthusiastic to read Peggy Orenstein‘s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, hoping it would clarify some of these nebulous concerns and provide some reasonable insight on how to combat it.

On the bright side, Orenstein does a good job of describing the problem, critically outlining the progression of the culture and providing a reasonable view of the potential dangers. The topics here are kind of all over the map because the subject matter here spans everything from Disney Princess marketing to Toddlers and Tiaras pageants to toy line gender division to social media and the Internet’s impact on teenage and pre-teenage girls’ sense of identity and sexuality. Distressingly, despite the book being well-researched, it became pretty clear to me early on that 192 wide-margined pages was not going to be sufficient to cover the topic(s) in reasonable detail.

And this where Cinderella Ate My Daughter kind of disappointed me, because it feels very rushed. Rather than focus on these topics and dive into scholarly research to a deep degree, or even heavy investigative journalism, the whole thing smacks of time-sensitive, here-and-now snapshot reporting which is interesting—don’t make any mistakes, I ripped through this book—but I was never able to shake the feeling that I was reading an extended blog post or Salon.com article. The self-inserted, personal account tone added to this, as did the multitude of timely pop culture references, everything from Hannah Montana to Twilight to Monster High dolls, it anchors this book in the present tense and, as a sad side effect, makes it also feel disposable. Even, to an extent, behind the times as the final chapter discusses the Disney movie Tangled in the future tense when I read the book less than a year after publication and my daughter has devoured the movie approximately ten thousand times already on DVD.

I suppose the subtitle of the book, “Dispatches From The Front Lines Of The New Girlie-Girl Culture” should have tipped me off that this wasn’t supposed to be a long-view kind of volume, but I still hoped that even without the step back approach it would contain some practical advice for how to deal with this deluge of pink and princessy. Toward the end, Orenstein does offer some vague and mostly common-sensical advice. Perhaps the best thing the book contains is a reference to a different book, Packaging Girlhood, which she says offers some sample conversation guides to help deal with media literacy and suggestive content. I’ll put that one on my to-read list. Unfortunately, Cinderella Ate My Daughter doesn’t quite get the scholarship level right and doesn’t even offer anything directly useful, either, making it an interesting and thought-provoking—if ultimately frustrating—read.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — January 08, 2012 at 12:25PM

Nobody Tells This to Beginners:

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from Like a Detuned Radio — January 07, 2012 at 05:32PM

@ironsoap — January 07, 2012 at 10:13AM

@ironsoap — January 07, 2012 at 10:12AM

author: Ernest Cline
name: Paul
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2012/01/06
date added: 2012/01/07
shelves: novel, science-fiction
review:
Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One isn’t a perfect novel, and not one I would recommend to just anyone, but it is the most fun I’ve had reading in a very long time. I typically read with a sort of substrata of emotion, wherein I experience the humor, joy, sorrow, tragedy and sentimentality internally, not usually allowing my external person to reflect these shifts of mood. I consider a writer extraordinarily successful if they can break that crafted illusion and evoke such a strength of feeling that I cannot help but laugh or smile or scowl or cry. There isn’t much heavy heartbreak in Ready Player One, but there is enough unchecked glee—for a bookish nerd whose formative years were in the 1980s—present to plant an unyielding smile on my face through most of the book.

Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, an introverted orphan struggling with daily life in a future some thirty years on. An energy crisis has made the planet unstable and governments have practically collapsed, but the world has found escape in a mega-MMO called OASIS, which is so immersive, so all-encompasing that it has nearly replaced real life for many, if not most people. The creator of OASIS, the enigmatic James Halliday, passed away five years prior to the events in the book. As his final legacy, he coded an elaborate scavenger hunt into OASIS, consisting of three keys to be found, three gates to be opened, and three challenges to be overcome. The prize to the player who wins the contest: an easter egg which grants control of OASIS and the company behind it. Fame, fortune, power, all up for grabs. Wade is part of a group of dedicated egg hunters, known as gunters, who have dedicated themselves to trying to win the contest, but for five years no one has been able to even locate the first key, much less make any progress on the contest’s empty leaderboard.

One thing all the gunters know is that the contest is rooted in Halliday’s life, and his passions for 80s pop culture: movies, TV shows, music and most of all classic video games. Then, almost by accident, Wade finds the first key and becomes an instant celebrity when his name shows up on the leaderboard.

This book is a love letter to the children of a particular era. Atari-loving, Goonies-watching, Robotech-quoting, John Williams-humming, arcade-haunting kids and teens will see their youthful passions elevated here to a ridiculous canon wrapped inside a internet and tech-loving über-World of Warcraft framework that is practically ready-made for the current crop of post-social nerdlets. As a card-carrying member of this group, Ready Player One spoke to me like no book since Snow Crash.

Let me make one thing clear here, though: This is not speculative fiction of the cerebral order that authors like Neal Stephenson can conjure. This is less engineer-nerd manifesto as it is pop-culture-geek fairy tale. And that’s okay, because I think it means Ready Player One is more accessible to a broader audience that has grown to embrace the labels that once haunted them as opposed to existing in a marginalized niche. But the result of this is that while Stephenson seemed to be predicting the future, Cline is clearly writing for the present. Certain modern-day shout outs cement this notion, with references to YouTube and Wikipedia marring an otherwise standalone universe. It’s possible those services will continue to exist in some form in 35 years, but their inclusion and others like it seemed to drag me out of the novel’s world and back into my own unnecessarily.

The plotting is undeniably powerful, as this is a ridiculously compelling and readable book, but some emotional resonance (beyond the grin-fixating nostalgia and triumphant underdog victories) is bypassed in favor of the breakneck pace. A dramatic scene fairly early in the story, for example, indicates either a certain emotional callowness either on the part of Wade or Cline (it’s not clear which). The central emotional hook does manage to work despite this same threat looming over it, mostly by virtue of the characterization prowess on display, but there is potential for this to be an even more resonant book, perhaps even a more memorable one, if Cline had taken just a bit more time to nurture a couple of key interactions.

And overall this is the central difficulty I have in determining a final opinion on Ready Player One. A part of me wants to note that there is room for improvement and this isn’t quite the novel it ultimately could have been. But there is another, much larger, part of me that just wants to hug this book and let it wash over me again with its conjurations of saturday morning cartoons absorbed over giant bowls of cereal, surrounded by armies of action figures and endless days exploring fantastic digital worlds drawn to my television by a rotating cast of game consoles. What ultimately seals the final analysis is that I realize I can’t recommend this book to just anyone. People like my wife, who shared the time period but had dramatically different childhood experiences, may enjoy the book on a base level but they won’t appreciate it like I did. My parents, also, are unlikely to find the particular marvel that Ready Player One represents for a subset of readers.

But my childhood friends, my brother, people I used to sit with on schoolyards and park swings and play “what if,” this is the culmination of all that crossover, culture-drenched daydreaming. And for those it is intended, it is triumphant. For everyone else, I suspect it is a fun ride, perhaps a touch trite, but still worth a chapter or two just to see if you can get into the rhythm. If your experience mirrored mine, this is a hands-down, five-star, gotta-read-it-now novel. For everyone else, I’d say it’s a solid and joyful celebration of a particular time period framed in a light morality tale. I’m content in the end to split the difference and note that more than most books, your individual mileage on this one, may vary.

from Paul's bookshelf: read — January 07, 2012 at 04:01AM