heywood on 29/12/2024 at 13:43
Qooper - I apologized because I typed that out and then realized I was in the
What are you reading? thread and not
Random thoughts...It wasn't like I got to work on a Cray supercomputer or anything, but it was cool because all those labs were like little geek playgrounds back in the day, each with it's own topology, rules, personality, and often humor. I worked in several places where my only computer was a UNIX workstation, and at one company I worked for (WSI, now The Weather Company) all staff had SGI workstations and only HR and finance had Windows. Back in the day I usually had the liberty to download, build, and install free software and would customize my environment a lot. I miss that. After-hours LAN gaming was pretty common everywhere I worked in the 90s and early 00s also. With the rise of IT, all that fun is gone, but for good reason.
Now I've dug out my copy of (
https://archive.org/details/designofunixoper00bach)
The Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice Bach along with
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language)
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. They had been in a box since I moved back here 10 years ago. The UNIX book is still interesting so I'll probably read through some of it again.
I never got to play with an MSX computer. They were pretty rare here in the US, where Commodore, Atari, and Tandy were in a price war. It's interesting and a little surprising that multiple companies standardized on its design. Which one did you have?
demagogue on 29/12/2024 at 20:39
Boy you know you're on a geek forum when the last 2 or 3 pages of a "what are reading?" thread are OS guides and manuals.
@LordBoof, the way I see it, a book like Alice in Wonderland is the kind of book made to be read by one person to another person they care about that's going to laugh and clap at its whimsy, which is typically either a girl of a certain age or a non-girl that has a-girl-of-a-certain-age's heart. Actually the game has the same vibe, but the book is of course an old school version of it, which I can see might try some people's patience or just not connect with people in our era.
I noticed it reading Treasure Island recently. It was innovating the whole pirate romance for boys of a certain age, and the introduction even sells itself on getting the seal of approval from the novelist's early teenage son, the most important qualification. But it's pretty lame by our standards today and wasn't speaking to me, just because of how far we've pushed that trope.
That didn't happen with Alice in Wonderland for me because for me it's so closely linked to reading it with someone. Actually that was especially the case for Harry Potter, because those books never connected with me from the start. To begin with, Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series did connect with me back in the day, and Harry Potter seemed to be replaying that and missing its mark. But they speak to different generations anyway, and that's fine. But the point is that I still got into reading HP to someone that was really into it, so to the extent it was special to me, it was through that experience.
So I think the punchline is some books can be special when you're reading them to someone, even if they wouldn't be so much so by themselves, and I think Alice in Wonderland is one of them. On that note, I have the idea that nobody reads books to other people anymore, and I think it was done a lot more in the past, but I recommend it if you can get away with it exactly because it brings out what's fun in a lot of books that wouldn't be there otherwise.
heywood on 4/1/2025 at 17:56
Definitely. Reading to someone has a different goal and offers a different kind of reward. It's also more memorable because it was shared.
I used to voice act sometimes when reading to my kids at bedtime after tucking them in. That brings another dimension to it and it's a challenge. It worked best with Winnie-the-Pooh, where the characters had simple and different personalities, so it was easy to give them unique voices and express their moods. Between the two books and short stories and skipping some nights, we stretched Pooh out over most of a winter. The kids say it's still their favorite because they loved closing their eyes and drifting off to sleep in the Hundred Acre Wood, and they can still remember some of the different characters and voices. It also got my son started with symbolic play and helped him get into a good sleep pattern during a time when he had a lot of stress. So that's an example where the quality and literary content of the book had nothing to do with our enjoyment of it.
Harry Potter didn't work for us as bedtime reading. I couldn't really voice act the characters because the kids had already seen some of the movies and had the actors' voices in their head. And the chapters were a little too long and detailed for them to stay awake through. We tried reading Harry Potter together on the couch, taking turns reading to each other, but they kept wanting to change books and argue over which one. My daughter and I did read some of her fantasy books together that way.
My son is still young enough that he likes when I read to him, which we don't do often enough. We're currently into sci-fi short stories. Our favorites so far:
Bears Discover Fire
All Summer in a Day
The Egg
Dusty Zebra
Sulphur on 8/1/2025 at 04:35
It's bizarre seeing Alice in Wonderland being described as an 'oldschool' version of its own vibe in comparison to the game it inspired. American McGee's Alice is basically the edgelord take on the original story, which is a neat gimmick if you're 14 with the blood and blunt violence, but wears out its welcome 10 minutes into the whole thing. The 'vibe' of Alice was of a world that was funny and odd but also dark and unfamiliar and unsettling in some ways, without swerving into overt horror; this restraint and teasing at the edges of how easily this could all turn into a nightmare (which TtLG moved a little further into) was what made it special and timeless.
The other thing to note about Alice is that it's got more in common with fairy tales and children's stories, and is a medium for what can only be described as classical English whimsy. Expecting it to have a plot and complex characters is missing the forest, the trees, and the whole island mass in its entirety. Either you get along with the fact that it's a story for kids from the age of Treasure Island and its ilk, or you move on.
Aja on 8/1/2025 at 04:52
Quote Posted by Sulphur
TtLG
Nice.
demagogue on 8/1/2025 at 07:39
I've been playing the sequel recently which ... I don't know how to articulate it, but it's a different vibe than the original game, definitely a lot better.
The OG was kind of ham fisted. The gameplay was stilted. I liked Alice's look and the whole cutey punk thing, but that's really the one thing it had going for it. But it's also been I think at least 20 years since I played it too.
But the sequel has an amazing world and some jaw dropping scenery. The gameplay works. The aesthetic is better. Alice as a character is better in her look and attitude. The characters and events are better.
But anyway, what I meant with that phrase ("old school version of the same thing") was that of course every generation has that critical age where they're into what stories like Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Lord of the Rings, and I guess Harry Potter are doing. There are some differences with the times, but I think basically they're hitting the same dopamine and oxytocin buttons that'd make a kid in the right frame of mind to want to laugh and clap. So that's how these stories can do that across generations. I was meaning to speak at a higher level of generality than this specific story & game and implying backwards inspiration or vibe; I didn't mean it in that way.
Also, again, I have in mind the sequel than the original, which ... I don't know if you could say it does a better job capturing the spirit of the book, but it does a better job of being a beautiful game that gets you into a cute-dark vibe and hits the emotional buttons better. I wasn't meaning anything any deeper than that.
Sulphur on 9/1/2025 at 05:55
I suppose I'm failing to see how a game like AMA is a newschool version of a book that's better read aloud to children, but leaving that aside, your point is akin to calling Hansel and Gretel 'oldschool'. I suppose in a technical sense that's been correct for about a century, but you get my bemusement at adjectivising a story under the umbrella of fairy tales/literary nonsense as fusty and old, when that genre is in and of itself timeless.
Harry Potter isn't quite of that mould as they're novels for older kids (and I personally avoid the books because they don't speak to me; the fact that JKR is a sentient walking pustule also helps solidify that decision), but there's nothing wrong with reading them aloud if you've got an audience with that attention span.
As for the Alice sequel... mm, I see what you're saying, but no, whereas AMA was a clumsy chore, AMR leaned into being a repetitive bore. It's got a little magic, but mostly it's like glimpsing a sparkle or two beneath rivers of increasingly dull dishwater.
demagogue on 9/1/2025 at 18:51
I'm not really disagreeing, although oldschool is the term from hiphop for the original authentic stuff that set the standard & everything afterwards is copying, kind of the opposite of outdated or irrelevant, but I didn't put any thought into it to begin with and anyway yeah it's mixing frames that it's dumb to mix. Bemusement isn't inappropriate.
In the big scheme of things, you're kind of flipping where I was going. Aside from the aesthetics, they're not good games, and I wasn't really trying to say they were, or I wasn't thinking that I was, if you ask me to put my critic hat & we start lining them up against legit good games. (We were talking about Subnautica & Mirror's Edge elsewhere; now those have game magic, the kind of thing that makes something a timeless classic, at least as far as we can approach that in our era.) It was more like, if this is the topic we're gonna talk about, this is what's good about them. And the big point is that they don't really stand up well with the books, one's a classic of world lit and the other is tapping into a cutey punk goth-girl vibe that was fashionable in the 1990s early 2000s. But if one were asked to stand them next to each other, this is maybe how you could, but I wouldn't even stand by that much. I'd recommend the game first to someone that was a fan of goth girl fantasy stuff, not a fan of the books, at least without making caveats for where it's taking it. You can't recommend it for the gameplay!
The topic wasn't even the games but the books, why they're classics. It's very contextual to creating a vibe, which is something the games are kind of trying to do in the same way, though they don't get too far with it. But in the back of my mind I was thinking that the game is the kind of thing that's going to make fans that, in our era, are gonna compulsively draw and dress up as goth Alice for Halloween. I think that's something it took from the book too, or it's a kind of trope of media that attracts rabid fans. You make strong characters that prompt some kind of allegiance, which probably has more to do with the aesthetics and iconic personalities that tap into some emotional trigger than the content or plot. The whole thing was supposed to be a defense of why the books are considered worthwhile even today, and why people rave about them so much, the books and the games, when their plots/gameplay don't really stand so well on their own. That's why, I think.
I just feel like typing. I don't know if there's much we're disagreeing about.
Arch Fenster on 9/1/2025 at 21:23
Current batch:
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane
The River by Gary Paulsen (just started!)
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (just finished!)
