A Nitrous Crouton

One of my online haunts is an obscure little IRC channel, a regular hive of scum and villainy, or at least some geeky approximation thereof. Like many such channels, it has a resident channel bot. The bot serves a variety of purposes, all of them frivolous. Puns are disdained on the channel. Therefore, one recent feature addition to the bot is a pun jar. As might be supposed, the pun jar is analogous to the famous swear jar. When a channel denizen makes a pun, one of their fellow members can tell the bot to punish (no pu…oh never mind) the offender. Punishing the offender adds a virtual $0.25 to the pun jar and the bot keeps a running total of the worst transgressors.

I don’t think this has exactly reduced the punnery in the channel. The term perverse incentive comes to mind. It did make me reevaluate the Turing test, however. I would be much more impressed by a bot that could recognize puns by itself versus one that could hold a conversation. It’s time to move the goalposts on artificial sentience.

We shall see what this weekend holds for me. Last weekend was a getting-my-ass-kicked-by-sci-fi weekend. Without getting into spoilers, all I can say about the season finale of Battlestar Galactica is that not only does Ronald D. Moore have gigantic grapefruit in his pants, he felt the need to kick me in the family jewels as well. They did something which pretty much eliminates neutrality as a reaction or opinion. I’ll get firmly into the ‘love it’ camp. I am rather bemused reading various criticisms, a lot of people will whine about shows being complacent, getting in a rut or playing it safe, but heaven forbid you actually make a big roll of the dice.

That was one cheek getting booted. The other was devouring Judas Unchained. Although technically a sequel to Pandora's Star, since they are really one unbroken work, I’m just going to lump them together and review them together. The rating? 4.5/5.0 Croutons.

Excellent stuff. While I enjoyed Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn books, they did have what felt to me like some jarring flaws. In Pandora/Judas, he has applied the same abundance of creativity and thought in creating a fascinating future galactic spread of humanity and technology that was the best part of Night’s Dawn. At the same time, Pandora/Judas avoids some of the silly or poor characterizations (which were most prominent in the early Night’s Dawn books), clunky plot elements and the literal deus ex machina ending that dragged down Night’s Dawn. Since I read fiction like a buzzsaw, even a hefty hardback like Judas gets eaten at around one hundred pages an hour, I liked the sheer amount of detail and action involved in the books. I will get irritated at repetition or filler, but neither were the case with Pandora/Judas. It would be easy to get overwhelmed, however. In retrospect I should have reread Pandora before reading Judas, it had been almost a year and I was belatedly recalling bits and pieces all the way through Judas. I had forgotten just how much stuff was crammed into the first book. Definitely read them together. Highly recommended.