jordangreywolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jordangreywolf) wrote2019-01-25 09:47 am
jordangreywolf) wrote2019-01-25 09:47 am
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[Reading] "Pattern Recognition" - William Gibson
With the number of trips I've had to take for work as of late, I've taken to digging through some of Gwendel's collection of books (the vast majority of which, I've come to learn, she's never actually read) for something to take along for when I'm stuck in the airport or on a plane, I haven't access to a laptop, and I've no mind to doodle.
My last such book was "Neuromancer," by William Gibson -- quite the trend-setter when it comes to the cyberpunk genre.
I'll admit, when I picked up "Pattern Recognition" to read, I was curious to find out what Gibson's cyberpunk would be like, circa 2003.
It's not cyberpunk, but I can definitely see that it's Gibson. The "voice" is the same, as is a consciousness of the past leading up to the present.
It's not really a thriller, either, even though several events happen that invoke paranoia in the main character, and there are indeed threats. In some senses, the resolution of the "thriller" aspects are disappointing, because there wasn't really so much "there" there ... and I think that's purely intentional.
True to the name of the novel, there are several story sub-threads that play with the concept of the human tendency toward recognizing patterns that may or may not actually be there.
First, the main character (Cayce) has curious "power" and "weakness" is that she has a peculiar psychological hang-up regarding trademark brands, corporate logos and mascots, etc. -- on the one side, she has severe, almost allergic reactions to them (to the point where she carefully removes all signs of branding from her clothes and tries to dress as "generically" as possible, and tends to avoid various places where heavy branding might be found) -- but on the other side, she finds employment as a consultant: She reviews prototypes for new logos, designs, etc., and has (or is BELIEVED to have) an innate sense for whether that particular design taps into something in the "zeitgeist" (my choice of term -- not in the story) that will make it catch on and be successful.
Second, Cayce is a frequenter of forums devoted to a sub-cultural phenomenon known as "The Footage." Basically, there are brief snippets of video that are released on the internet now and again, which appear to be segments from some larger feature film, but nobody can identify it -- and, indeed, even though the film has visible actors and actresses and appears to take place in an urban area, nobody can pin down where it takes place, or even in what time period it might be. (It also happens to be in black-and-white.) A goodly number of the fan following is devoted to tracking releases of these snippets, proposing in what chronological order the film segments might actually be intended to be viewed in, what sort of overall story they might be part of, and prying into all sorts of tiny details for any possible hidden meaning or clues.
A good part of the story is devoted to Cayce's attempts to find out more about the origin of the "Footage." The ultimate "reveal" about its origins has something to say about the phenomenon of "pattern recognition" as well.
Third, Cayce is haunted by the disappearance of her father in New York City during the events of 9/11 in the US. His body is never found, his whereabouts unknown (or even why he was in New York). Cayce's mother looks for whispers of the dead (specifically for voices of Cayce's father) in static of recordings made at Ground Zero. Cayce has dreams of her father trying to tell her things that are very vague and open to interpretation, and which MIGHT be prophetic ... or, again, seeing their fulfillment could just be another example of finding patterns where there are none.
But more than that, the story is fascinating for Gibson's prose. Cayce travels the world, visiting Tokyo, England, Russia, and a few other places along the way, and Gibson has a wonderful way of conveying the sense of place and time, sometimes striking me with an amazing efficiency of words. I recall that from "Neuromancer" as well.
Another Gibson feature I noticed right off was a consciousness of the past that leads up to the present. This is a very LIVED-IN world -- I felt that especially noteworthy for Neuromancer, in that too often I've been used to sci-fi settings where everything is shiny and brand-new, and there's a sense that "the future" just popped into existence one day, with little of note to lead up to it. There were plenty of allusions to obsolescence of prior technologies, re-purposing of buildings in a metropolis (or building pods in a gradually-built-and-expanded-while-lived-in space station), the coming and going of boom-towns, passing of fads, etc. I see that same sensibility here -- that consciousness that the here-and-now has a history leading up to it, and that this world won't reach "the future" and then just stay that way forever, immutable.
One difference between this and Neuromancer? No painfully awful sex scene. Thank goodness. Not that this story is in any way prudish. (Language and content warnings, as appropriate.)
If I'm going to criticize, I think it would be to gingerly criticize on the matter of technology. (And I realize this is getting picky -- the same sort of pickiness that would dissuade me from wanting to write sci-fi of my own, precisely because I know somewhere I'll get the science and tech embarrassingly wrong myself.) Even though Gibson, near as I can tell, involves technologies in all his stories, there seems to be a lot of it he's kind of oblivious to.
In "Neuromancer" -- and it seems to be something inherited by the Cyberpunk genre in general -- there's this sense that a computer program is a distinct THING that has a PLACE in the internet, and it can move from here to there. Your hacking program goes "into" the other system, and might drop a few little modules of code here and there along the way, and when you finish the attack, it has to work its way back out, and pick up those modules along the way -- else, I suppose, you'd lose your program. Don't unplug that cartridge too early!
(That was a big factor in R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk RPG, in that a big conceit of being a hacker was that you'd sink a bunch of money into your advanced AI hacking program, and intrusion counter-measures might very well DESTROY your program. Not crash it, requiring a reboot, but the thing is GONE. And, yes, you could get a "backup," as a spare, but that was an expensive and time-consuming process, on par with getting the program in the first place. It also makes me think of Tron, where programs are people, and you can "steal" a banking software program and force it do battle in a gladiatorial arena and be DELETED if it fails. Ack! Never delete anything from a computer again to save hard drive space, because PROGRAMS ARE PEOPLE TOO! ... Ack. Sorry, I digress. ;) These just represent some very EXTREME extrapolations from that sort of mindset.)
Here, in "Pattern Recognition," it's nothing quite so crazy, but there IS a subplot element that involves some "watermarks" embedded on video segments that are being used to track the distribution of the video. And to that, I have to think ... howzat work, exactly? I mean, in one sense, if you release the same video in several different channels, but you want to know, if anyone is sharing it, WHICH one of those channels the person got that film from, then embedding a watermark would be one way to secretly make a slight difference in the film so you can tell which one is which in what otherwise might appear to be an identical document. But the presence of the watermark itself doesn't somehow magically "track" the video. Maybe that's not quite what the author intended to imply, but it would seem that at least one of the characters in the story seems to THINK that's how it works (and if it didn't, surely she would have figured it out by that point).
There are lots of aspects of the book that feel a bit awkward, and somehow the ending feels a little disappointing after all the set-up. (If anything, the "big reveal" of the story I think happens oddly a great deal BEFORE the story ends -- so it's not exactly climactic.) However, it was an enjoyable journey for me, and I'm glad I gave it a try.
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If the videos had been distributed from a particular PLATFORM, then the platform itself could have been involved in the tracking (but then we wouldn't have had that whole watermarking MacGuffin -- it would rather have been "who controls the web site" or "where is the server" or something like that, I guess).
I suppose if Gibson had written this book just a couple of years later or so, some sort of YouTube clone might've figured into the plot, because I suppose that would only make sense -- but it wouldn't have become so established that one would simply assume that it would be *THE* (pretty much exclusive) place for video-sharing of this sort.
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I think it "helped" that I had certain "time landmark" points in 1980 (as it was my first "new decade," and I remember a big deal being made about it in the various shows and publications I followed as a kid, so I was very conscious that it was a "new decade"), and then again in 1990 (I started college in the 1989/1990 semester, so the new decade marked a new sort of life for me), and then of course with 2000 (thanks to the Y2K scare and all the hype about a new millennium). Compared to all that, the break between '09 and '10 didn't seem so distinct.
Going back circa 2000 or so: I was working at the Evil Corporation (That Shall Not Be Named Due to Scary Legal Papers I Had to Sign When They Let Me Go Promising Not To Talk Ill of Them in Public) around the turn of the decade/century/millennium, precisely because I was hired on in relation to the big Y2K scare. (I.e., their banking software stored years in FOUR digits, whereas so many banking programs only stored TWO, so they got a lot of business in banking software conversions in the ensuing panic with 2000 looming.) Then, not that long after 9/11, they let me go, and around 2002 or 2003 is when I started working part-time at ITG.
And back then? Well, around that time, there was THE INTERNET more-or-less as we'd know it now, but I don't think there was casual browsing of streaming online video content. I seem to remember that around 1999-2000 or so, Flash videos were still a thing, where you'd have to sit and wait for some Flash cartoon to load for several minutes, and then watch a simple cartoon that would only last for seconds. Badger-badger-badger-badger (mushroom, mushroom), et al., came out in 2003. (I just checked, and yeah, it was right around that time.)
Netflix existed back then ... as a DVD distribution system; it didn't start streaming until 2008.
At ITG, when we showed concepts to focus groups, we had artists drawing things on pen and paper, and I had to photocopy them, cut them out, and TAPE them onto printed documents, copy, then distribute for groups. It wasn't until around 2004 (when we moved to our new office, and I got a networked scanner and printer combo) that my preferred practice of SCANNING the artwork, then just inserting it as an inline image in a Microsoft Word document (with all the text) and PRINTING it (no tape or white-out required!) became standard practice.
Our initial AV system in the new location circa 2004 included a DVD player in the kitchen for playing music (primarily before the session would start, while people were milling around), and occasionally video snippets (as part of "creative excursions," where we'd show a clip of some movie that was remotely related to the topic at hand and encourage the participants to use that as "creative stimulus" to brainstorm on ideas related to the topic).
iTunes was a new and shiny thing. I think it was in 2004 that we got some company iPods. Fragile little things, though. They didn't last long.
Oh yeah. D&D edition 3.5 came out in 2003. That was a new and shiny thing as well! Valve's "Steam" online platform launched in 2003, but at the time it was only used for Valve's own programs, such as Counter-Strike; third-party games wouldn't be available on Steam until "Rag Doll Kung Fu" in 2005. World of Warcraft came out in 2004. (Okay, so my particular viewpoint of what constitutes the development of the internet is a little bit FOCUSED on particular game touch-points. ;) )
I honestly can't remember when I first got a cell phone, but I think it was sometime in the '00s. The prevalence of cell phones would have to be one of the major touch-points for impacting when a story is set in the '00s, I think. iPhone came out in 2007. My boss at ITG was using a Blackberry circa 2004-2006 or so.
I'm hazy on the details, but I THINK that 2008 was around the time that I was wrapping up my involvement in the Warcraft fandom, finally experimenting with making artwork entirely digitally (Wacom tablet, Photoshop, and Illustrator), and then having my hey-day with assorted Savage Worlds projects. Before that point, I had experimented with doing digital artwork for coloring, but it required a pretty high-end computer to be able to handle the huge memory requirements of large-resolution layered images. Oh, and the FILE SIZES!
Hmm. What happened in 2010 in my little gamer-focused life? Well, there was Fallout: New Vegas, aha! My first introduction to the Fallout universe. ;) (I'd heard of it before, as Prester_Scott was quite a fan of the original Fallout games, but it had been presented as something grim and gritty that he thought I would have no particular interest in, so I never tried them.) According to one snippet I found, even though YouTube had been around since 2005, it wasn't until around 2010 that it became quite the big phenomenon that it is now, partly thanks to improved infrastructure/internet speeds overall.
Flash drives (AKA thumb drives, key drives, USB drives, flash sticks, memory sticks, and so on and so forth) I think might have been available in the '00s, but I think circa 2010 or so, memory capacity was still measured in MB -- certainly not GB or TB.
That kind of makes me wish I could backtrack and see the progression of commonly-available hard drive sizes over the '00s. I vaguely remember being awfully impressed when I went to Best Buy and saw a hard drive for *1 TB* being available. Now I understand that there are FLASH DRIVES that can store 1 TB?! Maybe I should get one of THOSE to do my backups before I go on a trip. And somewhere along the way, laptops started and then stopped having integral CD/DVD drives and burners, but I'm not sure of the particular range of time when that would have been a "thing."
Hard drive sizes definitely have a huge impact on how we treat digital content (casually storing them, or deleting them immediately after watching, being able to store songs, or entire movies, or just snippets), and would be relevant to how people would treat "fragments" as per the video snippets from that story.
I've got a few dead Iomega external hard drives sitting around -- as I used them to try to back up my laptop and PC contents, and then the things would FAIL on me, and I had various work files and artwork and such on those drives that I think I might not have anywhere else. If only I could recover it all ... but now I don't even remember what might be on there. Now I'm wondering if the concept of an "external hard drive for backups" might be obsolete, even discounting the idea of storing things "on the cloud."
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2008 is pretty much when I started working for Google, I think, so before that was There, which was circa Second Life, being a competing VR space. Everyone was flailing around trying to find the killer app for the Intarwebz!
I think the 1TB flash drives are fairly recent, but yeah, the storage sizes of things like USB plug-in drives have gone up fairly exponentially over the past years.
I guess... um... Livejournal was a thing back then!
Other than that I'm pretty hazy on things. -.-
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Wow. I forgot about Second Life and There. Not that I ever got involved in either one of them. I think maybe Koogrr did some stuff in one of those platforms?
And, yeah, LJ goes a long way back. What I forgot is whatever journal platform I was on immediately *before* LJ. (Mostly what I remember from way back then, circa 2000 or so, is making repeated mistakes of "posting while angry" and losing friends that way.)
I'm pretty sure the 1TB thing has to be recent for flash drives. Hard drives, not quite so much. I haven't even SEEN a 1TB flash drive -- I just was talking about flash drives during a recent project, and someone had commented that they'd gotten up into that range, which took me for a loop. (Though, the cutting-edge flash drives are still a bit pricey. I'd feel nervous having something that tiny and that valuable.)
A quick online check, and we're talking somewhere in the $300-$400 range for a 1TB flash drive, whereas a 1TB external hard drive is $50. (Hmm. I'd be tempted to get one -- the hard drive, that is, not the flash drive -- but I wish I could get some assurance that it would last longer than my old Iomegas did. Expensive data-crushing bricks, they turned out to be.)
And, yeah, just to be clear, my memory is VERY hazy, and getting more so by the day, it seems. :/
What's really scary for me is that back when I was on a writing binge circa ... good grief, how long as that been now? Back when I actually wrote story segments in my "BitzBox" LJ account? Anyway, back when I tried writing stuff like "Rulesbreaker" and "Shards," I had some pretty vivid recollections of what it was like back when I was a kid. At least, I recall the abstract idea that I had such vivid recollections. It doesn't seem quite so vivid to me now. What's even more bizarre is that there are quite a few things that I "remember" that, when I check up on the chronology of things with others, it simply CANNOT BE TRUE. (Either that, or I'm right and everyone else is wrong, which feels kind of egotistical.)
It's as if, in the recollection, I made some mistakes, mashed together bits and pieces of different memories with my brain filling in a few gaps, and now the resulting mess is as solid as any presumably *genuine* recollection I have. It bad enough to just /not know/. It's more worrisome to "know" what simply isn't true. :(
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Ever thought about going back to writing? I've been working on a space trader LitRPG novel lately.
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And then, there are so many story concepts I can think up, where I feel like I've just accomplished an "unintended Aesop." And that's just as bad, I think.
But mostly it's a matter of motivation. Once upon a time, I was surrounded with people who were interested in what I drew or even what I wrote, and I returned the favor, and -- wouldn't you know it -- that's a pretty ripe environment for being motivated to actually do something. ;) Now, most of the feedback I get is from people around me who have me paint their miniatures for games and such, so that's mostly where I "accomplish" anything. (But that feels more like "craft" -- I'm painting something sculpted by someone else and produced in mass quantities -- than "art.")
So, yeah, now and again I think about going back to writing. But thinking about it and then seriously devoting the time to DOING it? Well....
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Though RoyalRoad is reaching prominence as a site for serializing stories, too. Once I have the first book written, I'll probably start serializing it, as a low-key way to see what people think.
With respect to scenarios, setups, and problems, maybe try outlining it first? If you run out of ideas for how to save your characters/prevent the bad thing from happening, go back up the timeline and add something that might put solutions within reach. Only once you have something that seems plausibly like a decent story would you then want to start committing scenes to paper (figuratively). Mind you, even with an outline, my story still diverged significantly, but I am managing with the 'go back and add things' strategy.
After all, unlike GMing, you do have the luxury of going back and changing things in writing... at least until it's published, and then you have to be like Larry Niven and write a whole book because someone spotted orbital mechanic problems in the original Ringworld.
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I've actually done some proofing and feedback on some friends who have written fiction, and it can be quite bewildering at times trying to remember what IS and IS NO LONGER true at a given point when major revisions are made to the story's timeline in the course of the writer's attempts to edit it into the form that he wants (due to writing himself into a corner, or major editing to try to cut down to a word-count limit, or response to critical feedback from a potential publisher, etc.).
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Here's an example, a LitRPG featuring a teddy bear in a fairy tale sort of world:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15130/threadbare
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Or do you mean something like, say, SinaiMUCK with its focus on logging sessions for posterity, where we role-play characters, but with more "meta-plot" control on the part of the players?
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For example, if you can instantly restore your health/mana from a level-up, then it becomes useful and if you're close to leveling up, you might tackle a really tough fight with the notion you can kill some small fries in the middle to get back to full health/mana. Also, as a character, you might be familiar with what skills/abilities you'd gain at level-up, and have some plan for what you're going to choose from the options available.
The wider category is 'gamelit' or 'game-centric literature' which features things like Joel Rosenberg's Guardian of the Flames series, Larry Niven's Dream Park books, or Drew Hayes's NPCs, but the more specific category of LitRPG means that the game system being featured within the book is an RPG with characters having stats, skills, abilities, perks, and such, and the rules of the game are known, or knowable, to the characters.