Diversity and IRC

Yesterday i forgot to write about how weird it was to walk onto the street where the Jenison Memorial Day Parade (2007) was being held. I don't think of my life as bringing me into contact with a huge diversity of people. But when i saw the overwhelming homogeneity of the crowd, with their fashionable clothing and trendy hairdos, i felt really out of place. Even though i've got fashionable clothing and a trendy hairdo. Oh come on, you've seen one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, right? Have you seen how many people with dreadlocks there are? Yeah, short, weedy fuzzy dreads... okay, i admit that i'm too cheap to have fashionable clothes, and i'm still in the middle of the Bad Hair Year that short dreadlocks doom one to. But then as i look at where i work, i find that i'm among minorities (ethnically, at least) a great deal. And while at Meijer today, i heard Spanish being spoken more than English. And the conversations were just as boring as the ones in English were... but less swear words.

Oh -- several of the low-impulse-control kids at work who i don't know very well have said "He looks just like Jack Sparrow!" Um... yeah. I do think i look more like Johnny Depp than i used to -- hollowing cheeks as i age, sparsely whiskered cheeks -- but there's no way i'm that ridiculously good looking. Probably it's the bad hair and the fact that i really do act pretty weird. With the googly eyes and stuff.

Um... oh yeah, IRC. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it's a network invented, to text chat with others, even before hypertext (what "ht" in "html" stands for) took over the Internet. And like everything in the wild west frontier of the net, it's being used to transfer pirated materials. Aaarrrrrr. And i've been looking for Vernor Vinge's latest book for a long time, and i d/l'ed mIRC today and hooked up to #bookz on Undernet, and yaaaay, they have it! Not that i downloaded it at all... um... or put it on my palm pilot as soon as i could... nope. But i became very happy anyway. Say... i should put that book on hold at the library.

And seriously, if there's any sci-fi fans out there, you HAVE to read Vernor Vinge. I really wish i had never read any of his books, because i want to read them again for the first time. That's how good they are. If you like "hard" sci-fi. "Hard" means "scientifically plausible, as far as we know, or at least not patently ludicrous". I get the sense that my taste in books is like my taste in music, lots of people agree with me, but nobody i know, and nobody i'm likely to meet. Sigh.

Thanks for the tip Juanito, I have read all of the Stephen Baxter books now and have an itch to read more “hard” sci-fi. If you have not read any Stephen Baxter start with “Moonseed”... put it this way, in the first chapter or two the entire earth gets eaten by a wierd rock from outer space, kinda like paint thiner and styrofoam. (is that spelled right?)

Anyway.. cool.
-- jj - 31 May '07 - 20:44

I read Baxter’s Titan, and found myself annoyed with his obsession with the two words “meniscus” and “gibbous”. However, i haven’t read Moonseed, so will put that on my list immediately!
-- juanito (Email) (URL) - 31 May '07 - 21:24

You have to answer this silly question because it keeps spammers off my site:
What are the last three letters of Juanito's name?
What's the last three letters of Juanito's name?  

Name:		Remember personal info? YesYes NoNo
Email:
URL:
Comment:		Emoticons / Textile
Small print: All html tags except <b> and <i> will be removed from your comment. You can make links by just typing the url or mail-address.