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The Ravings of Robert F. Beeger

The End of The Mongoliad

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My subscription for The Mongoliad ended a few days ago and I did not renew it.

My initial enthusiasm for it melted away after half a year. I haven’t read a single chapter since June or maybe even May. Serial novels don’t seem to work for me. I prefer to read a book at my own pace. I just cannot stand to have to wait for the next chapter for a week or maybe even two or three weeks.

It’s the same with tv series. I watch the first episode and maybe the next two. Then I get impatient and if the series isn’t really gripping or otherwise fascinating, I don’t watch it anymore.

I had expected that The Mongoliad would keep me reading longer because Neal Stephenson is part of it, but somehow it isn’t like any other book from him.

I suspect that either he doesn’t participate in the writing of the book or that the serial character of the book isn’t doing it any good.

Though I don’t know anything about writing fiction books, I can imagine, that it’s quite hard to write a book if you cannot return to an earlier chapter and fix a part or add something to make the whole book work better. The Mongoliad looks — at least to the point where I left it — like a cronologically sorted collection of stories about some people. The stories themselves are OK, but somehow there is something missing, something that makes me want to read on.

Pinboard

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When rumors came up that Yahoo would shut down Delicious some time ago, I started searching for an alternative online bookmark management solution. Finally I came across Pinboard and signed up for an account. Importing all my Delicous bookmarks was a piece of cake and the interface looked nice and clean.

Then Delicious wasn’t shut down. It only got sold to another company. So somehow I returned to Delicious. I don’t have many bookmarks. I collected 350 of them and sometimes there are weeks when I really don’t add a new one. So it’s not as if the bookmark manager were a vital tool for me.

Anyways Delicious started to irritate me a bit recently. It looks bloated and they seem to add features I don’t really need. So I returned to Pinboard recently and will probably stay there. It still has the clean and nice interface and a useful mobile variant of it. The feature set  hasn’t changed for ages, but as it’s good as it is it doesn’t need to.

There’s one difference to Delicious that will matter to some people. For a Pinboard-account you have to pay a one time sign up fee of currently 9,51 $. The fee is getting increased by one cent for each new account.

In case of being interested you can browse my public bookmarks at Pinboard.

 

Void Trilogy

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The Void trilogy is another three volume space opera by Peter F. Hamilton. It’s not really revolutionary. But if you liked “Night’s Dawn” or the “Commonwealth Saga” — his former space operas — you’ll like this one, too. It’s a sequel to the Commonwealth Saga and since persons from it make reappearances here and situations from it are referenced reading the saga first is a good idea.

As in his former books, in the Void trilogy there’s a conflict that threatens a whole galaxy. People travel faster than light in space ships to prevent the catastrophe and some nice political and religious games are played out on a great stage.

This time around a singularity — the void — is the cause of great concern. Science fiction has seen some books about singularities — great artificial or somehow otherwise strange intelligences — in the past and many of them probably with scientifically better theories, but Hamilton’s take on the subject is nevertheless a good read.

Actually there are two stories told alternately. One takes place inside the void, where people have some amazing psychic abilities. The other one takes place outside the void, where people view the inside story while dreaming. Naturally some of the outsiders want to get into the void while others try to prevent them from getting inside.

Both stories provide lots of suspense  and fun and merge in a nice final.

Another redesign

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It’s been nearly 5 years since the last redesign of my blog.

Time to change it again. This time a lot of things change.

Naturally the design is the most apparent change. It’s very minimalistic now. There are no images in the header and the footer and no boxes around the individual posts. I’m using a webfont from Google’s font directory to give the headings a somewhat distinctive look. The HTML is html5 with all the new shiny tags like article and header, but that’s something nearly no reader of this blog will ever notice. I have also put some work into making it readable on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

The biggest change is in the backend though. I’ve moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress.

With the move to WordPress I also decided to deactivate commenting and trackbacks on this blog. Comments and trackbacks have mostly been spam in the last few years and a pain to sort out. I have included tweet and flattr buttons on each post. So you can comment on my posts via twitter or if the comment doesn’t fit into 140 characters on your own blogs. If you like a post you can flattr it.

The Mongoliad

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The Mongoliad is Neal Stephenson’s new book project and it fits perfectly in with his most recent books – the Baroque Cycle and Anathem. So if you liked those books you’ll like this one, too.

As the title – The Mongoliad – suggests mongols play an important role in this book. It’s 1241 and the mongols are on their way to conquer the world. They have already reached Poland. Here’s Neal Stephenson talking about the setup:

The Mongoliad is different from those earlier books in one important aspect. It’s not a book in the classical sense. You cannot buy the finished product printed on paper or as an ebook. It’s published on its own website one chapter each week. And beside Neal Stephenson there are 6 other writers and even more people who are somehow involved in the whole thing.

The Mongoliad is not the first book of its kind. Some years ago Tad Williams tried the same approach with Shadowmarch. Shadowmarch was canceled 2002 after one year because it didn’t attract enough subscribers to pay the bills. It was published as a printed book sometime later.

I think this time around it could work. You don’t need a desktop computer or notebook to read it. You can read it on an iPad or any other of the forthcoming tablets. There’s said to be an iPad app waiting for approval by Apple that will improve the reading experience.

There are also some kinds of social features. You can rate and discuss each chapter with your fellow subscribers and with the writers. There’s also a forum. Those features are rather unimportant for me and till now I haven’t partaken in any of the discussions.

As with classical books, the content is the one and only thing that interests me. The already released four chapters present a gripping and well written story. So I think the 10$ for the yearly subscription fee is well invested money.