Posted by Skrud at Thursday, January 31st 2008 at 7:32pm
I’ve been watching the jPod TV series since it starting airing on CBC a mere four weeks ago. I remember seeing the ads for it and thinking “I should probably watch that show … it was a great book!” but of course I never bothered to take notice of when it was showing. The first episode caught me off guard since I stumbled home one night and it had just started, and it was actually funny. I was entertained throughout the first 10 minutes, but then I had to leave to meet some friends and just watched the episode later when it was finally “available” for download. Compared to the book as I remember it, the TV show is pretty close adaptation. It’s better by far than any book-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen.
jPod or Microserfs?
I enjoyed jPod a lot, since it felt to me like an updated Microserfs, but I didn’t like it nearly as much as I loved Microserfs. Both are written by Douglas Coupland, but Microserfs is easily one of my all time favourite books. I first read it (according to my blog) in January 2004, and I’ve re-read at least 4 times since then. Each time I read Microserfs I get so much more out of it. The book is chock full of references to nerd culture and geekdom, yet all tied together in such a meaningful way. When I read Microserfs, I felt like it was a book that understood me.
jPod was a similar style of novel to Microserfs, but it never resonated with me as strongly. I always felt that jPod was simply too over-the-top and exaggerated for me to relate to the characters. jPod is also full of nerd references, but I think it’s to a fault. At one point it feels like the references are simply there for the sake of paying lip service to something that the readership will recognize, chuckle silently to themselves and shrug. Basically, jPod felt to me kind of how xkcd feels to Nick.
jPod on TV is so much better!
The funny thing is that I’m completely taken by the TV show. I love it! I’ll watch an episode over breakfast with my morning coffee and be in an enlightened mood for the rest of the day. I think part of the reason is that the wackiness and over-the-top-ness work so much better in live action than in prose. The same things that turned me off from the novel make for a lively and entertaining television-viewing experience. It’s as if jPod were meant to be televised. The novel lends itself easily to the kinds of amusing, unlikely scenarios that make sitcoms work, but at the same time it’s infused with the social commentary and searching for meaning that Coupland’s characters do so well.
This is the first TV show that I’ve followed in ages. I’ll keep watching. :)
Tags: books, jpod, microserfs, reading, tv | 5 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 6th 2007 at 12:00pm
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. According to Google Reader, exactly 65 of them. A lot of those feeds are the rarely updated blogs of friends (or in the case of Angelo and Heather, regularly updated).
The nice thing about Google Reader is that it has a “shared feed” feature, which lets me choose posts out of any of the feeds I’m reading and share them. Those posts get packaged together and displayed, even given their own feed). You can notice that little feed widget on the left side of the screen for my shared posts, too.
On top of the geek and programming blogs and webcomics, there are bunch of feeds I follow that are – for lack of a better word – uncharacteristic. At least, they’re feeds that you probably wouldn’t think I would read. I figured I’d profile them here…
Cognitive Daily
Cognitive Daily is a blog about cognitive psychology, published by Dave and Greta Munger. Greta is a professor of psychology at Davidson College and Dave is a writer. Together they report on peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology – stuff like What we hear, how it affects what we see and Insight into how children learn cultural values.
I have no idea why I’m interested in this stuff, but I love it. I suppose on some level, my interest in the subject was piqued with Kathy Sierra’s presentation at CUSEC 2006 (listen to the podcast, though it’s not as good without the visuals). Kathy brought up interesting insights about how pleasing your users, and creating passionate users, is about understanding how humans think and feel and react. Although I know I’m more of a head-buried-under-the-code type of programmers and probably don’t think about users (other than myself) nearly often enough.
Deep Astronomy
I discovered Deep Astronomy thru Digg, when there was a post about How to Destroy the Earth with a Coffee Can. Astronomer Tony Darnell writes about various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, with a lot of tongue in cheek humour that makes it entertaining (and you learn a ton) – like How to Avoid Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Sickness in which he describes the universe as “one very big microwave oven.”
Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
Retrospectacle is a very recent addition to my feed aggregator. I discovered it when there was a post on microscopic images of beer. Beer is extremely pretty up close. The blog is written by Shelley Batts, a 3rd year PhD candidate who researches hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, in the opes of using it as a therapy for hearing loss. She recently had a post about the basic concepts of hearing that was a great article about the ear and how hearing actually works.
Again, I have no idea why I find this stuff fascinating, but Retrospectacle is definitely an interesting and fun dose of science.
Seed Magazine - I Can’t Believe It’s Science
Astute readers will notice that two of the above three blogs are part of Seed Magazine’s “ScienceBlogs” section. Well surprise, surprise, I subscribe to Seed’s main feed as well. But the only thing I really read from this feed is Maggie Wittlin’s weekly ”I Can’t Believe It’s Science” column which documents interesting and weird sort-of-related-to-science things.
Tenser, said the Tensor
Named after a song from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Tenser, said the Tensor is a blog about linguistics. Unlike more generalized linguablogs like languagehat – which I used to read – Tenser, said the Tensor focuses on linguistics in science fiction. One example is a post about the language of the Children of Tama in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode. Linguistics is a subject that’s always interested me to varying degrees. In fact, I probably would have gone into Linguistics or English Literature if I didn’t get accepted into Computer Science when I started university. (Just imagine! Skrud the linguist instead of Skrud the programmer!)
Mind you, I don’t think linguistics and programming are all that different. At some level, you’re still dealing with grammars, syntax and semantics. The only difference is that computer languages are context-free. (Mmmm… finite state automata…)
The Dilbert Blog
The Dilbert Blog is Scott Adams’ blog, and thusly named as he is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. Scott Adams is hilarious. His blog covers tons of things I’m not interested in at all (politics, philosophy, etc.) yet with the delivery of a stand-up comedian at a Just for Laughs gala. Sometimes he posts about current events and warns asexually reproducing Komodo dragons to stop giving our human women ideas. Or he’ll write about a gender test and how ridiculous a test like that might be.
TVInJapan
Finally, there’s TVInJapan. The best thing since prepackaged, sliced bread. TVInJapan is loaded with tons and tons of random, hilarious, interesting and often absurd clips from television in Japan. Clips can be loaded with Ultraman doing the Scatman, or the reproduced-everywhere Hand-made Star Wars. Sometimes there are television commercials with the infectious Tarako Cupie Girls or Superpowered School Girls. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Greased-up movers, Surprise crowds of 100 people chasing random pedestrians and much, much more. On TV. In Japan.
Unfortunately Japan is pretty anal about copyrights and those clips constantly get removed from YouTube, so in order to make sure you really get the most of TVInJapan you definitely need to subscribe to the feed.
And there you have it … a small subset of blogs that I read that have nothing to do with programming – though I guess they could still count as geek blogs given how heavily science-oriented they are.
Enjoy!
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging, reading, science | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, July 11th 2006 at 9:22pm
Summertime is great for reading. Especially during Fantasia season when I spend hours waiting in line for movies. I finished Children of the Mind last night, so I figured this would be a good time to write down the list of books currently in my reading queue. In no particular order:
Well, I just got up to go look at my bookshelf and ineed there is nothing more that I haven’t yet read. I want a break from Sci-Fi; I’ve read way too much recently. What I really want is a Banana Yoshimoto book. Amazon, here I come.
While I’m at it, I’ll also pick up JPod by Douglas Coupland and Dark Water by Koji Suzuki. After Ring, Spiral and Loop, and I can’t get enough Koji.
Tags: books, reading | 4 comments
