book and music reviews

[sub_divided]

Post on last weekend's mini-vacation at the other livejournal. Includes a review of Glasvegas, who weren't really worth coming back into town for, but at least now I know that. *g*

Finished a book on the train from Boston to NY - The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail J. Sellen (an anthropologist specializing office cultures - very cool!)

Comments

[petronia]

They're not all set in the same universe, actually - he writes trilogies. XD So Spook Country was the second, now he's working on the third.

(Probably Gibson's own fan forum was all the research he needed for the footagehead thing. XD; He feeds the speculation, too, by posting WIP snippets. Although he started doing this for the third book just as I was reading Spook Country, which sort of spoilered the characters' fates - not that I was really expecting anyone to die or the world to end.)

[sub_divided]

Ahaha. I guess "cult" is the wrong word, it's more like a single absorbing hobby that brings people who are otherwise very different together on one forum, where each contributes according to her knowledge base or his life experiences. Not like livejournal, where you are more likely to find like-minded people with different hobbies who are friends. (Or not, shouldn't generalize.)

[petronia]

IDK, I met pretty much everyone I know on LJ via all-consuming hobby? What happens is that, when I drift from a fandom, I'll shed ten people but keep talking to two (and like as not 7/12 remain friended). Sometimes you bump into the same people years later in a different fandom, or you never share fandoms again but still sort of keep up because you find each other's real lives interesting.

[tarigwaemir]

Hm, I didn't realize that he wrote more than one book in the same universe. Maybe if I read more Gibson, Neuromancer and Idoru would start to make more sense or at least I will come to terms with why they don't make sense. Pattern Recognition sounds pretty intriguing already; I'll put it on my to-read list.

[sub_divided]

Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, and Spook Country are the three that I've read. Neuromancer was a long time ago, but the other two are about the shadow world of marketing, which is however less shadowy than the shadow world of espionage. Or something like that. XD; Actually it kind of reminded me of Michael Clayton, where the shadow world of corporate lawyers is less shadowy than the shadow world of corporate espionage. The books also touch on the art/music worlds in places, with cameos from (made up) minor celebrities, characters who are in bands, etc.** What you really see is how much these worlds overlap. (Also with Internet World

[uminohikari]

But even the best electronic imitation is still just an imitation :|

[sub_divided]

The idea isn't to trick your brain into thinking that you are working on a real desktop, it's to let you organize your electronic files the same way you can organize physical files.

In the book, Sellen and Harper talk about why, when all documents are now created on computers, we are not only still using paper, we are using more paper than ever. Their two major points are 1) office culture revolves around paper and will be slow to change, and 2) people like paper, not only because it's what they're used to, but because there are many things you can do easily with paper that you can't easily do with computers. So I thought it was interesting that some programs are trying to duplicate the things you can do with paper - mark it, stack it, etc.