DaOitMK.
if anyone knows off the top of their head what that means (except robin) i’ll give them $2.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
last night around 11:30 i decided to start reading my new book (recommended by robin) down and out in the magic kingdom…. and around 2am i decided to go to sleep after having finished the book.
it’s a pretty good book, i enjoyed it (as evidenced by my reading a 200 page book in one night). it’s set in the future, when mankind has conquered death, and everyone has a computer in their brain, and society no longer relies on money. If you die, you just get restored from a backup of your brain made before, and you get a clone of your body. Instead of money, there are Whuffie points, which are essentially the respect you have from others. since everyone has a built-in computer, you can look up someone’s Whuffie instantly, as well as pretty much anything other info about someone when you meet them.
it’s an interesting idea for society, the more popular you are, the more priveleges you get. if nobody likes you, you might have your car taken away, or if you’re really popular, you can get into a nice restaurant.
anyway, it’s a strange book, probably one of the weirder ones i’ve read; weird in a Brazil (the movie), Kurt Vonnegut kind of way. China Mieville, Stephen King, Clive Barker, they all write strange stuff, but it’s not wacky strange, it’s scary or mystical strange.
If you want to read it, you can download it for free from the author’s website, which is another interesting thing. Cory Doctorow has published 2 (soon to be 3) books under the Creative Commons License and is freely availble to anyone who wants it, in a variety of forms. You can buy it if you want, or you can just download the (pdf, html, ps, ebook, doc, txt, etc) file and read it like that.
I bought the book in… book form, cause i don’t really like reading books on a computer, plus i generally read when i’m in bed before i sleep, and not having a laptop makes it really uncomfortable to drag a computer into my bed.
You can only get it at a few physical bookstores, or online at various places.
Next up: The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman - another recommendation from Robin.
I’ll probably read Eastern Standard Tribe from Cory Doctorow at some point.