Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

The nerdosphere had a nerdgasm about Ready Player One. I was curious enough that I checked out the author's appearance on (friend-of-the-blog) The Dork Forest. He seemed like a hoopy frood, so I kindled the book and just now got around to reading it.

To be honest, I was a bit worried about the first few chapters. It seemed like there was little there except 1980s nerd allusions. In brief, the set-up is that in the not too distant future, an aging (ok, dead) bajillionaire sets up a Willy Wonka game/contest to choose his successor. And getting the bajillion dollars requires you to know all about 1980s nerd stuff. The whole premise seemed like a strange psycho basement nerd's justification for all his toys and games. 'You just wait! My mint-in-package action figures, Robotron skills, and extensive trivia knowledge of ALF will be worth billions some day! Mwahaha!' It's a little grotesquely self-indulgent that it seems just about everyone in this world-of-the-future spends their time obsessing over the 1980s (give or take a decade), rather than inhabiting their own world. As far as you can tell from the story, there's no such thing as new music or films in the world, just recycled music and TV shows from th... oh shit.

Fortunately, after the nostalgia enema, the plot settles down and provides a fun ride. And, yes, I am not immune to a story that can reawaken the remembered thrill of hearing some crazy word-of-mouth friend-of-a-friend story (in the pre-internet age) about a little dot in Adventure. And then finding it. Or recognizing that the bad guy's employee number is the same as little Alex's inmate number.

In short, if you are a nerd about my age, this will provide at least some cheap thrills and a pleasant trip down memory lane, or maybe through some twisty little passages all alike. Not that non-nerds not my age would be left out entirely (unfortunately?). One of the clumsiest things is that occasionally Cline takes the time to explain something that everyone reading his book probably already knows. You don't need to explain Tempest to me, dude. Even if I did suck at it. (Incidentally, Tempest is not an easy thing to describe in words.)

Sleeping Dogs / Portal 2

I dug the demo, so I picked up Sleeping Dogs, a sandbox-y GTA-y game set among the triads of Hong Kong. I guess the game went through some development hell, and there are some rough edges here and there, but on the whole, it's a pretty good game. It doesn't break much new ground -- it's not a real innovation to take the reasonably free-flowing combat of Arkham City and glue it onto a Grand Theft Auto clone. But at least it offers a lot of variety and little mini-adventures crammed in, here and there. Not that many main missions, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. The only real negative is some of the mini-games are a bit lame and tedious. At least with the lockpicking one it only shows up about 5 times in the game. But the safecracking one happens more often than it needs to, for something that just is a wall that wastes your time until you complete it.

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Finally getting around to Portal 2. I'm about x% of the way through (It's kinda hard to tell). I like how they've expanded the world in a lot of different directions. It coulda been "25 new levels for Portal," but it's really got a lot of great new ways to puzzle your puzzler until your puzzler is sore. And there's nothing like that feeling when you're in the thinking-with-portals (or flubber, or lunar dust, or...) groove.

Endeavour at LAX

I know all the Angelenos are posting about this, so I'll add one piece of trivia to make this worthwhile.

As you know, my office is reeealll close to LAX, so I had a great view of Endeavour. We emptied the office to go have a gawk at it. I knew that since they were setting up viewing on Imperial that they were going to land on the South runway. Which is bad, since the office is along the North runway route.

The first sight was pretty impressive. Even small and in the distance as it was, it was clearly not the same as the usual airplane. But fortunately, this was just a first pass, and they buzzed us along the North Runway!

After that, we saw it turn up north, and it went to visit my pals at JPL/Caltech.

Eventually, it came back for another flyby over the south runway, and then finally the landing run. We didn't have very good sights of that, but the flyover was more than enough! It was also neat to see people on all the roofs in the area.

My set of photos

Oh, I almost forgot the trivia. So Endeavour is named after James Cook's HMS Endeavour. We know that Endeavour will wind up at the California Science Center. But where is the original Endeavour?

HMS Endeavour was renamed the Lord Sandwich... MMmmmmm... sandwich... and in August 1778... in order to confound the French fleet... the erstwhile Endeavour... was scuttled... in Narragansett Bay. Not far from HPL's beloved Providence.