Wednesday Reading
Jun. 15th, 2022 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeRead:
Skellig by David Almond.
One of the books I borrowed, last holiday up north, from some people we visited whose house contains the residue of a second hand bookshop they used to own overseas: great riches.* Alas, I don't like this one. The idea is resonant: a boy whose baby sister is sick finds a man, Skellig, squatting in the dangerously rickety garage of their new house. Skellig may be an angel, he may be an owl, but whether he's a miracle-worker or a predator he appears to have given up all hope and interest in the outside world. Can the boy tempt him out, and if so, will he help? Bits of this land for me, but I mostly don't like Almond's style: the sentences are simple, short, and repetitious. The way ideas flit from mind to mind – Arthur Itis as a name for arthritis, and the idea that shoulder blades are where our wings used to grow – flattens people out. I paused for the long time a few chapters from the end, thinking “Well, I should see if all these bird/angel/William Blake references end up anywhere especially interesting,” and I don't think they did. I don't think child-me would have liked this either, I think messy despairing Skellig would've disturbed me like Paul Jennings books used to, though at this distance who knows.
Floornight by Nostalgebraist.
Nostalgebraist likes to do strange things with sentience, and then take that to deeply fannish places. I'd already read The Northern Caves, in which the members of a niche fandom chat server for a children's fantasy series theorize about their beloved author's dissonant and incoherent final work in more and more alarming ways, and also have cute gay makeouts. In Floornight, the discovery that souls are real and manipulable with physics leads to horrifying ethical situations, also a frenetic anime plot and cute gay makeouts. By frenetic I mean 'all the cool high concepts Nostalgebraist could think of at the time', like, you'd think the undersea base from which government agents pilot weapons powered by their own fractured souls against incomprehensible alien beings would fill more than a handful of chapters, but no, too much to get through in this short novel, on to the next thing!
It has the virtues and also some of the vices of having been serially written online: despite having the affect of a puzzle-box story, a lot of 'Why does x work that way?' questions resolve to 'Because it was so cool' or 'Because I wanted the anime visuals, I mean come on, how could I have left this scene out?' Which I'm mostly down for! Though I probably shouldn't have read the last ten chapters all in a lump late at night, because they did leave me with a taste of 'I thought all these plot points were going to come together in a more inevitable way.'
One of the things Nostalgebraist is good at is varied writing styles – not necessarily perfectly but with such enthusiasm that I don't especially care. There is an AI who talks in endless run-on verbosity and a scientist who thinks in extremely short, disconcerting sentences. Sometimes they skirt the edge of annoying me, and a subset of those times I think they're meant to.
Reading:
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schull.
Nibbling my way through this.
A study of slot machines and how they work. Its key point is that gambling addicts, who provide a massively disproportionate slice of casino profits, aren't playing to win, they're playing to enter a state of easeful disconnection. As the industry has realized this, it's grown ever more successful, transitioning from machines that pay out rare jackpots to machines which let players win small amounts often and lose large amounts slowly. It's like that Screwtape quote about the safest road to hell being the smoothest one – except that when the rest of someone's life is full of sudden turnings, glass, gravel, and signs saying 'No through road', Screwtape wouldn't even need to pretend his road didn't lead to Hell for more than the first half-mile; after that he could say, 'We both know where you're going, but where else would you get such a lovely walk?” To be in a place where the risks are known, and you know how much you'll lose and about how fast, is valuable to people. Designers will claim that they're in the business of entertainment, but also admit that players actually dislike most attempts to make machines more interesting because they are fundamentally not turning up in order to be interested.
Sub-points covered in this thick book: casino architecture, the skeuomorphic design of machines, reels, and payout schedules which let players feel in control of purely random processes, the ways regulatory bodies have looked at various illegal or pseudo-legal things and gone, “I don't know, it just all seems kind of fine, you know?”, the disconnect between designers who one moment are talking about how problem gamblers are an aberration and the next use phrases like 'we're building better rat traps'. I haven't yet got to most of the book's personal anecdotes from gamblers, which I expect to be the most harrowing.
I'm reading this book partly for story research, partly because I tend toward compulsively playing simple computer games – not to a comparable degree but for what turn out to be similar enough reasons that I am never going to try a slot machine, because a desire for easeful disconnection is all very well for a while but the last thing I need is to hook it up to an organisation which would profit by making it permanent.
*It was a slightly non-Euclidian-feeling house full of bookshelves and teenagers doing implausible numbers of crafts (one is building a forge, one is spinning my mother's sheep's wool, one does three styles of dance and makes candles and feijoa vodka; as someone on the Scintillation discord said, it seems certain they're going to go out one by one to seek their fortunes). We also played Dominant Species, which isn't quite Cones of Dunshire but does have cones of dominance, whose placement needs to be determined anew several times a round by multiplying three changeable numbers together in every board hex. Though a bit much, it was fun.
Skellig by David Almond.
One of the books I borrowed, last holiday up north, from some people we visited whose house contains the residue of a second hand bookshop they used to own overseas: great riches.* Alas, I don't like this one. The idea is resonant: a boy whose baby sister is sick finds a man, Skellig, squatting in the dangerously rickety garage of their new house. Skellig may be an angel, he may be an owl, but whether he's a miracle-worker or a predator he appears to have given up all hope and interest in the outside world. Can the boy tempt him out, and if so, will he help? Bits of this land for me, but I mostly don't like Almond's style: the sentences are simple, short, and repetitious. The way ideas flit from mind to mind – Arthur Itis as a name for arthritis, and the idea that shoulder blades are where our wings used to grow – flattens people out. I paused for the long time a few chapters from the end, thinking “Well, I should see if all these bird/angel/William Blake references end up anywhere especially interesting,” and I don't think they did. I don't think child-me would have liked this either, I think messy despairing Skellig would've disturbed me like Paul Jennings books used to, though at this distance who knows.
Floornight by Nostalgebraist.
Nostalgebraist likes to do strange things with sentience, and then take that to deeply fannish places. I'd already read The Northern Caves, in which the members of a niche fandom chat server for a children's fantasy series theorize about their beloved author's dissonant and incoherent final work in more and more alarming ways, and also have cute gay makeouts. In Floornight, the discovery that souls are real and manipulable with physics leads to horrifying ethical situations, also a frenetic anime plot and cute gay makeouts. By frenetic I mean 'all the cool high concepts Nostalgebraist could think of at the time', like, you'd think the undersea base from which government agents pilot weapons powered by their own fractured souls against incomprehensible alien beings would fill more than a handful of chapters, but no, too much to get through in this short novel, on to the next thing!
It has the virtues and also some of the vices of having been serially written online: despite having the affect of a puzzle-box story, a lot of 'Why does x work that way?' questions resolve to 'Because it was so cool' or 'Because I wanted the anime visuals, I mean come on, how could I have left this scene out?' Which I'm mostly down for! Though I probably shouldn't have read the last ten chapters all in a lump late at night, because they did leave me with a taste of 'I thought all these plot points were going to come together in a more inevitable way.'
One of the things Nostalgebraist is good at is varied writing styles – not necessarily perfectly but with such enthusiasm that I don't especially care. There is an AI who talks in endless run-on verbosity and a scientist who thinks in extremely short, disconcerting sentences. Sometimes they skirt the edge of annoying me, and a subset of those times I think they're meant to.
Reading:
Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schull.
Nibbling my way through this.
A study of slot machines and how they work. Its key point is that gambling addicts, who provide a massively disproportionate slice of casino profits, aren't playing to win, they're playing to enter a state of easeful disconnection. As the industry has realized this, it's grown ever more successful, transitioning from machines that pay out rare jackpots to machines which let players win small amounts often and lose large amounts slowly. It's like that Screwtape quote about the safest road to hell being the smoothest one – except that when the rest of someone's life is full of sudden turnings, glass, gravel, and signs saying 'No through road', Screwtape wouldn't even need to pretend his road didn't lead to Hell for more than the first half-mile; after that he could say, 'We both know where you're going, but where else would you get such a lovely walk?” To be in a place where the risks are known, and you know how much you'll lose and about how fast, is valuable to people. Designers will claim that they're in the business of entertainment, but also admit that players actually dislike most attempts to make machines more interesting because they are fundamentally not turning up in order to be interested.
Sub-points covered in this thick book: casino architecture, the skeuomorphic design of machines, reels, and payout schedules which let players feel in control of purely random processes, the ways regulatory bodies have looked at various illegal or pseudo-legal things and gone, “I don't know, it just all seems kind of fine, you know?”, the disconnect between designers who one moment are talking about how problem gamblers are an aberration and the next use phrases like 'we're building better rat traps'. I haven't yet got to most of the book's personal anecdotes from gamblers, which I expect to be the most harrowing.
I'm reading this book partly for story research, partly because I tend toward compulsively playing simple computer games – not to a comparable degree but for what turn out to be similar enough reasons that I am never going to try a slot machine, because a desire for easeful disconnection is all very well for a while but the last thing I need is to hook it up to an organisation which would profit by making it permanent.
*It was a slightly non-Euclidian-feeling house full of bookshelves and teenagers doing implausible numbers of crafts (one is building a forge, one is spinning my mother's sheep's wool, one does three styles of dance and makes candles and feijoa vodka; as someone on the Scintillation discord said, it seems certain they're going to go out one by one to seek their fortunes). We also played Dominant Species, which isn't quite Cones of Dunshire but does have cones of dominance, whose placement needs to be determined anew several times a round by multiplying three changeable numbers together in every board hex. Though a bit much, it was fun.
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Date: 2022-06-18 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-18 03:37 am (UTC)