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mmcirvinI'm taking a much-needed vacation this week. I was happy of that today, and doubly happy that Kibo and I decided to go down and visit ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jwgh tomorrow instead of today; because a mysterious wave of extreme humidity rolled through town this morning, covered the city like a boiling wet blanket, and rolled out again around midday, causing the inside of my head to swell up and throb all morning, making it impossible for me to do anything.
I think the congestion affected my inner ears-- I was dizzy and nauseated and could barely walk. I thought at first that it was some allergic effect of breathing stale air from the AC system, so in an attempt to get fresh air, I momentarily opened the front door and got socked in the gut by this tremendous hot fist of tropical air that made me gag. Time for Plan B.
So I took a cold shower (paradoxically this seems to help in these situations), Benadryled myself up too heavily to operate motor vehicles, and took a series of naps in between reading Bruce Sterling's early novel The Artificial Kid.
The Artificial Kid is entertaining and imaginative, though it has structural problems-- the whole plot runs on absurd coincidences; people being accidentally rescued by long-lost friends who arrive out of the blue, that sort of thing. That reminded me a little of Candide, but Voltaire was more obviously kidding.
The most dated thing about my copy (found by Sam a few days ago at a used-book store) is not the text, which is from 1980 and written in a jolly proto-cyberpunk style, but the book design. It's a reissue from the nineties as part of Wired Books' "CORTEXT" series, with a foreword by William Gibson and an ostentatious shiny foil cover printed with text in a goofy biform font developed for the movie "Outland", and the page and chapter numbers all have gratuitous leading zeroes. It's the most cyber book ever! My copy of Rudy Rucker's wild-ass mathematical fantasy White Light is from the same series, and the design is even less appropriate there.
jwgh tomorrow instead of today; because a mysterious wave of extreme humidity rolled through town this morning, covered the city like a boiling wet blanket, and rolled out again around midday, causing the inside of my head to swell up and throb all morning, making it impossible for me to do anything.I think the congestion affected my inner ears-- I was dizzy and nauseated and could barely walk. I thought at first that it was some allergic effect of breathing stale air from the AC system, so in an attempt to get fresh air, I momentarily opened the front door and got socked in the gut by this tremendous hot fist of tropical air that made me gag. Time for Plan B.
So I took a cold shower (paradoxically this seems to help in these situations), Benadryled myself up too heavily to operate motor vehicles, and took a series of naps in between reading Bruce Sterling's early novel The Artificial Kid.
The Artificial Kid is entertaining and imaginative, though it has structural problems-- the whole plot runs on absurd coincidences; people being accidentally rescued by long-lost friends who arrive out of the blue, that sort of thing. That reminded me a little of Candide, but Voltaire was more obviously kidding.
The most dated thing about my copy (found by Sam a few days ago at a used-book store) is not the text, which is from 1980 and written in a jolly proto-cyberpunk style, but the book design. It's a reissue from the nineties as part of Wired Books' "CORTEXT" series, with a foreword by William Gibson and an ostentatious shiny foil cover printed with text in a goofy biform font developed for the movie "Outland", and the page and chapter numbers all have gratuitous leading zeroes. It's the most cyber book ever! My copy of Rudy Rucker's wild-ass mathematical fantasy White Light is from the same series, and the design is even less appropriate there.