Man… I have to blog again? I think I might be starting to weary of these daily posts. We’ve been doing this for like, what, 73 days now? I think there are three stages to any routine: The beginning, where it’s kind of hard because you’re not used to it, but you’re still motivated — this is where you’re most likely to fail simply because you forget. Then comes the middle, where you’re just coasting because repetition has made the act nearly automatic. If the chore doesn’t require a lot of thinking, you can just zone out while doing it; kinda get into that “driving somewhere very familiar” frame of mind. But then comes the third stage, where you begin to get impatient with the repetition and find yourself dwelling on how many more times you’ll have to do this thing that, by now, has become so utterly mundane to you. Some people are lucky and never get to that third stage. Or they experience it only temporarily. But if you stay there too long, you’ll either quit or start getting a little crazy.

I just came up with that but it sounds fairly true, right? That’s how I see it anyway.

I forgot to mention that I finished Teranesia the night before last. They got into some really interesting stuff towards the end. I’m always so thoroughly satisfied when I can grok at least part of Egan’s science stuff. I never really understood his wormhole mechanics in Diaspora, but I think I figured out the São Paulo gene/molecule in this book. And it’s really brilliant; hard to explain, but it basically rewrites existing creatures’ DNA based on what evolution found to be successful in the animal’s situation in other realities. It’s sort of like the molecule looks into the future, then applies whatever random mutations allowed survivability and reproduction. But it’s not sentient; the whole process is just the product of a quantum computer that solves every problem by brute force. It answers the question: “What if evolution wasn’t constrained by causality?”

The only thing I hated about the book was that it felt like it left me hanging vis-à-vis Prabir’s future (now that he’s had all these revelations and he’s been freed from the the overwhelming duty he felt towards his sister and dead parents), how the world would cope with this new “disease,” and what Prabir would have become had the São Paulo molecule finished its work. There was also this cryptic stuff about Prabir seeming to anticipate the mind-to-software conversion Egan uses in his later books; “Come the revolution” is repeated like a mantra a few times when the main character is frustrated by intolerance, irrationality, physical shortcomings, etc. But unanswered questions aside, it was pretty good.

I wanted to buy another Egan book, but it seems I’ve read everything that’s in print. And all the out-of-print stuff is really expensive, even for very used copies. The cheapest Permutation City I could find, for example, was $29 with shipping. How can people charge that much for a paperback from 1994 with a creased spine? It’s not even signed, for Pete’s sake. Ridiculous.

Last night Jones and I watched Smokin’ Aces. I liked it. Then today we watched Dawn of the Dead (2004). Great movie. The DVD has some really great bonus features; a couple amateurish (but entertaining) short films that follow minor characters from the movie, and a couple videos about makeup, extras, and mechanical gunshot special effects (there’s probably a term for this, but I don’t know it).

Re: TotD: I use Gmail and I love it. My single account consolidates all the messages I receive from about ten different addresses; @hjo3.net, @upsidaisium.com, @wsu.edu, etc. Plus I can send from those addresses through it with a drop-down in the From field. And it’s all accessible via the web or POP3. But most people already know this stuff, right? Does anyone think there’s a better provider than Gmail out there?

BTW, here’s the web site I’ve been working on for that for-sale-by-owner home in Pasco: tricitiescountryliving.com. If you know anyone who might be interested, do feel free to give them that URL. :P

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