Count_Zero
I listened to this as an audiobook and enjoyed it immensely, and learned some useful information. I do feel that King's advice about plotting (and avoiding it) is not applicable in any way to writing good mystery novels. At best that leads to forgetting threads of the narrative (like the lost murdered chaffeur in “The Big Sleep” and at worst that leads to the wholesale cheating that mars much of Agatha Christie's work.
About 6 years ago, a sort of scandal rocked the gaming industry related to a blog post by a woman known as “EASpouse”. The blog post criticized EA's labor practices at the time, which required employees to work massive amounts of unpaid overtime, as they were salaried employees. By massive, I mean about 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week, regularly. This was a big deal among gamers, because very few of us had ever had the opportunity to peek behind the curtain like this. It was likely that most of us viewed game development with a variation of the way that Roald Dahl as a child imagined the inside of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory near the boarding school he attended (which later led to Charlie & the Chocolate Factory).
The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder shows that such working conditions are nothing new. The book follows the development process of Data General's micro-computer (sort of like a rack mounted server, except it's the size of the whole unit, but essentially only being one of the server nodes), that would be a successor to their Eclipse line of microcomputers, code named the Eagle, and later released as the MV/8000. The book goes into both the personal and technical aspects of the development process, profiling the various men (and a few women) involved in the project, and giving a description of the technical aspects of the process for the layman.
While the technical bits (pardon the pun), are enjoyable, the book's strength, and where it spends most of its time, is in profiles of the people. The book paints a bleak picture of the inner workings of Data General. The working conditions at Data General, particularly on this project, are brutal. Much as with EA Spouse, employees are salaried, with no overtime pay, and work 12-16 hour days, 6 days a week. As the project goes on, project leads and younger employees are worn down. Often, employees at Data General observe that the company brings in a lot of new fresh recruits, and few stay at the company after they turn 30. Many of these new recruits drop out for various reasons, and often employees discuss the company's sweat-shop like working conditions. As the project moves into the heat of summer, the air conditioning breaks, turning their windowless basement office into a sweltering oven, which they can't even leave the door open for, for security reasons. Only after the employees strike do they fix the air conditioning.
By the end of the book, several of the project leads, themselves burned out, leave the company, and while some of the employees on the Eagle team stay on, many more have left.
Tracy Kidder got an impressive amount of access at Data General when he wrote this book, and while he's honest and truthful about what happened there, Data General, at least to my 21st century mind, comes out of this book smelling like shit. I base this solely on what Data General does, and I know this because Kidder doesn't whitewash - he thankfully calls it right down the middle.
While the book is never accusatory, it makes clear that Data General is a predatory employer. It preys on young, semi-idealistic college Engineering graduates, who don't have a lot of job experience and are looking more for interesting problems to solve, interesting work to do, than a big paycheck. They promise them interesting problems, and briefly, very briefly, warn them that there will be long hours and possibly a limited social life, that this job will become their life. To meet the deadlines required of them they will have to give up friends, family, and the outside world, living only the job, for months or years at a time. Plus, because they're salaried, despite all the hours they get that would be overtime, they're only making their standard pay grade.
It chews up 22-24 year old kids, and spits them out at 30, burnouts who had great potential, but were consumed by their jobs. They don't say if many of these former employees stay in the industry, and some certainly do - Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes and current Chief Software Architect at Microsoft is a Data General veteran. However, those who leave the industry with a sour taste in their mouth will probably leave worse off then they would be if they worked somewhere else. Had they been actually paid overtime, they could have possibly built a nest egg that could have allowed them to retire early, or to at least take their time looking for work elsewhere.
While some poor decisions related to processor architecture helped to kill Data General right before the dawn of the 21st century, it is my suspicion that the boom in Silicon Valley may have inspired a brain drain. Nicer weather, a less oppressive corporate culture. For people who wanted more money, there was the change to come in on the ground floor of companies which had the potential to be worth millions and get significant stock options. For those who preferred challenge, they could face whole new challenges when designing new systems and new architectures at the new companies in the Valley.
In summary, the book is a high resolution snapshot of the early days of the computer industry, before the internet started to permeate our lives in subtle ways - computerized tax processing, credit cards, ATM machines, and so on, leading up to the more overt ways it would later find its way in - Bulletin Board Services, E-Mail, and finally, proper web pages. People interested in the history of the computer industry will certainly find this fascinating. People who don't care about the history of computing can still find something in the profiles of the people in this project, and how the project's process slowly wears them all down.
In “A Generation of Swine” Hunter S. Thompson turns his sharp and angry wit upon the 1980s, particularly the Regan administration,, through the rise of “Greed is Good” economics and the Iran-Contra scandal, up until the Iran-Iraq War.
It is, beyond a doubt, an excellent book. It's not as sharp as volume 1 of the Gonzo papers, but Volume 1 had some of his most famous stuff (that wasn't written explicitly for other books) in there - his article about racial tensions in California and his meeting with Oscar Acosta, covering the Kentucky Derby with Ralph Steadman, etc.
Nonetheless, this is excellent work from Hunter, and I whole heartedly recommend it.
Mick Foley is, by far, one of my favorite non-fiction authors (I haven't read any of his fiction). This is an excellent book and perfectly wraps things up from the last two memoirs he's written (more or less), covering how his last feuds in the WWE were, basically, built. It's a very interesting look at the process of how feuds are done in Pro Wrestling, at least in the WWE. Anyone who is interested in how the pro wrestling industry works (particularly since The Wrestler came out) should pick this and Foley's other two memoirs up.
This book, basically, covers all of the Star Wars comics up to those published shortly after the release of Episode 3 (thus comics directly relating to the results of Order 66, and comics in the early portions of the Dark Times era are omitted) - not due to deliberate omission, but because of the publication date.
This book is, basically, the most complete collection of all the Star Wars graphic novels published up until Episode 3's release, covering everything up to (in the Star Wars timeline) the Legacy era, and the expanded KotOR era. Basically, if you want to get into the older Star Wars comics, this is really where you want to go - it's the best place to start you collection, or your readings in general. It's not entirely comprehensive, and as in the case with many of these collections, the addition of recently published comics makes it obsolete, but it's still an excellent book to have in your collection.
The beach volleyball game was really funny, and I really wish that had gotten adapted in the anime. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded seeing this whole arc animated.
If you were expecting something more in the horror line, you might be a little disappointed. This is definitely a more conventional mystery-thriller.
The Hawk Moth has survived, Kunato is messing with things that he probably shouldn't be, and the exodus by the Lem most likely lead to everyone there getting killed.
Straight up, this is the only good book of Ennis' run on The Punisher. The rest of his Marvel Knights run was spewing bodily fluids from all his orifices on the characters of Wolverine, Spider-Man, and Daredevil - especially, of all characters, Spidey.
This is worth reading for the novelty value, but nothing further. This series and Ennis' Marvel Knights Punisher run made it clear to me - Garth Ennis doesn't like superheroes, thinks they're all stupid, and presumably keeps taking jobs writing superhero books because he finds the lols of trolling not only superhero fans, but also his employers, to be more enjoyable then having to write superheroes.
This book, and the Marvel Knights Punisher Run, have made it clear to me that if I see Ennis' name on a book, I just just put it down, and walk away.
We finally get the backstory for The Friend, and also, somehow, the state of the world has managed to get even worse
I'm intrigued enough by the ending of this volume to keep reading to the next volume, but I'd put this book in the kind of limbo where if the payoff to what this book sets up is too weak, then it could sour the whole run.
I really like the shift in inking and coloring when the story shifts from the past to remarks from participants in the present.
This book is amusing, certainly, but I wouldn't exactly call it a great work of computer history. It's basically the story of a humorist working for a corporation, sitting in the cogs. It's inoffensive and worth checking out from the library, but I wouldn't call this a must-have book about the history of the computer industry.
Bruce Sterling's seminal work “The Hacker Crackdown” is a tough act to follow, but Masters of Deception does a pretty good job of doing just that - by discussing the split between the Hacker group The Legion of Doom and The Masters of Deception - with a split over philosophy (among other things) - should Hackers be about elitism - whose Kung Fu is the strongest, or should it be about exploration and sharing knowledge, the original hacker spirit.
One of the things I really like about the PC Peter Grant graphic novels is that DC Guleed gets a lot more screen time in the graphic novels than she does in the books, and we get a bunch of wonderful little interludes with Nightingale.
The Athena arc really feels like it's coming to a head soon, and I'm interested in seeing what effects this will have on the status quo because clearly there are going to be some changes at the end of this arc.
Very visually stunning final installment to the manga - with a lot of expansive vistas (and a penultimate chapter that feels like a reference to Angel's Egg - which I appreciated).
Aside from what I learned about this period of horror fiction, this book made me really wish that there was an artbook of the covers from the horror novels from this period.
I'm doing a vlog post on this book later, but to put a long story short, I feel that the travelogue part of the narrative and the conspiracy part of the narrative just didn't mesh, and ultimately made reading the book an unpleasant slog. Thus, I'm lemming this book.