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Something I noticed re-reading Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand"
I recently re-read Roger Zelazny’s “Doorways in the Sand,” which I last read when I was a teen-ager. I loved it as much today as I did then. One of my favorite Zelazny books, which makes it one of my favorite books.
In that novel, a character in his 60s is looking back on his life and says that the world goes through one massive change after another—but they happen one at a time, spaced out at long intervals, and after each change life goes back to pretty much what it was before, so you can convince yourself nothing has changed.
Then you look back over the course of 40+ years and the world is completely different from when you were 20 years old.
I glided over that passage when reading it first as a teen, but re-reading it again over the past few months it hit me hard.
In my adult lifetime, we’ve seen the emergence of he Internet, smartphones, the rise of China, the end of the Cold War, Covid, Donald Trump, the fall of the USSR—after each of these events, we could say, “That was a big deal but still our day-to-day lives are not much different than they were before” And yet you put it all together and the world is very, very different than it was in 1981.
This rule does not apply if you or someone close to you is personally affected by any of these global changes. And these changes can affect hundreds of millions of people — that’s what makes them global. But billions of people are not directly affected by these changes. For them, each individual change is a jolt and then life goes on mostly as it has done before.
The mystery of consciousness is deeper than we thought [Philip Goff / Scientific American] — We lack even the beginning of an explanation of how the brain produces our inner world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes. A thought experiment with “pain-pleasure” zombies illustrates the mystery.
The small, prosperous Parsi community of people in India leave their dead out naked in the forest to be consumed by vultures. [99percentinvisible.org] — Learning about this tradition horrified me at first — but only for an instant. The Parsi tradition is no weirder than burying dead people, burning them up, or chucking them in the ocean. The Parsi tradition just seems revolting to me because I’m not used to it.
Om Malik: The future of writing: How AI will shape our tools.
AI doesn’t write for me, but it helps me write and I expect more of that.
37Signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY, is introducing Writebook open source software for publishing books on the Internet
37Signals co-founder and CEO Jason Fried:
You know, it’s really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems.
But it’s surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company’s handbook can be a book. Or an actual book like Shape Up can be a book.
…
So we did something about it. Introducing Writebook. It’s a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in.
My new newsletter is ready for signups
Sign up, if you wish to. The newsletter is a daily digest of all my posts here. I’ll give it a week or so to make sure all the bugs are shaken out, and then migrate all the subscribers of my old newsletter to the new one. But I’m pretty sure all the bugs are out now.
Subscribers to the old newsletter won’t notice much change. New layout. New email “from” address; it’s now “MitchW@hello.micro.blog,” so if you’ve got any filters configured based on the old email, you’ll want to update those.
The newsletter is now hosted on Micro.blog, the same service that hosts mitchw.blog. Thanks to Micro.blog proprietor @manton for his work on this!
“Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.”
Living in a Lucid Dream. By Claire L. Evans.
Guided dreaming beats lucid dreaming because lucidity spoils the experience of dreaming and turns dreaming into a kind of virtual reality game.
Imagine sitting across the kitchen table from your deceased parent. “You don’t know it’s a dream,” [Adam Haar Horowitz, a dream researcher and cognitive scientist], said. “That’s the beautiful thing. You’re sitting with them. Why would I want to be in a dream and know it’s a dream? I want to be in the room and want to have the conversation with the person. I don’t want to poke them and say, ‘Wow, what a good hologram.'”
Tonight’s movie. Brings back much of the top cast of the 1984 film, and stars new faces. Predictable, charming and enjoyable. I like that Eddie Murphy lets other people steal scenes. Now do 48 Hrs.
Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV
They’ve just announced casting for Molly.
Elsewhere on the Internet, I’ve been involved in a discussion of anachronisms in the book, which was published in 1984. It’s a very 80s version of the future, with challenges for bringing to the screen today.
The opening line of the book is, ““The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s a great line, but you’re gonna have to explain that to anybody under 50.
A climactic scene in the middle of the novel — a fantastic scene — takes place at a bank of pay phones. My autocorrect doesn’t even recognize the word “payphones” today, which underscores my point.
In another climactic scene, the characters are on a spaceship, and the hero asks if the ship has a modem.
A big part of the novel’s premise is that Japan is a global superpower.
Still, the story of Neuromancer still works today.
“Neuromancer” was seminal to the Generation X and younger Boomer entrepreneurs and engineers that built the Internet; in the early 90s, you saw a lot of companies and technologies with names lifted from the novel, the way “Lord of the Rings” is used today. It’s a novel that I admire but do not enjoy. Still, I’ll watch the show — could be fun.
I'm switching newsletter hosting to Micro.blog
I’m in the process of moving the newsletter version of this blog to to the same company that hosts the web version, Micro.blog.
A big part of the reason is that Mailchimp, the company that currently hosts the newsletter, is owned by Intuit, which is not a nice company. I’d just as soon not be affiliated with that company any more than necessary.
This is still a work in progress, but I hope to complete it within days.
Current newsletter subscribers should not notice much difference.
If you’re interested in subscribing to receive my posts by email, you can do that here.
However, be warned that the new service is still a little buggy. I have it configured to send out updates daily, but instead, it seems to send updates every time I post.
I’ll keep the old newsletter running until the transition is complete.
On Ask a Manager: Great reply-all email catastrophes.
Ask a Manager is a website where I can get lost even worse than on TV Tropes.
When I get stuck on a reply-all chain, I perpetuate the catastrophe with feigned innocence.